YoRocko!

A timely text from a friend yesterday asked if I had read danah boyd’s anti-Facebook rant. I hadn’t. Well, I’d skimmed it. So I went and read it. Thanks, friend.

The privacy conversation has never really interested me. I have no illusions about the possibilities when I share something online. I’m making an informed choice to share something about myself and calculating that the potential negative consequence is worth what I gain from sharing it. I do this with strict personal rules: I don’t share things about other people without their consent. I don’t post pictures of other peoples’ kids.

I’ve always assumed that everyone else does this too.

But Boyd has carefully stated what’s at stake with Facebook’s activity. It’s not really privacy, but informed consent. Facebook  has made it confusing and difficult for its users to control the people (and–more to the point–advertisers) who see what they share. The privacy settings are confusing, and for that reason, users are being coerced into sharing personal data with audiences they never intended.

When it comes to my stuff, I can handle this. But churchy social media types ought to be more concerned with other peoples’ privacy than their own. How concerned are we that scores of teenagers, for example, are having their personal data mined without their consent? Facebook is providing a platform for ill-intentioned audiences to harvest personal information shared by users who, developmentally speaking, are still learning how to navigate complicated privacy legalese.  It’s opportunistic, and it presents real problems for people (like myself) who are otherwise rosy about young people’s social media activity.

The Facebeook defense has been, essentially, that people choose to participate in Facebook, and so they should be willing to accept the consequences. But when that choice is made by people who are developmentally or socially vulnerable to complex and even misleading privacy settings, the integrity of their “choice” has to be questioned.

A teen may accept an invitation to a party as an opportunity to mix with their friends. But if the host of that party invites lots of people the teen doesn’t know, people who are after the teen’s personal information for economic gain; if the host establishes a default “public” setting to the interaction–that just by being there the teen is consenting to sharing everything they do there with with everyone else–and everyone who everyone else chooses to share it with; if the teen can opt-out of that arrangement only by leaving their friends behind at the party or taking valuable party time to fill out forms specifying who’s allowed to see what they’re doing: who would say that the teen had a fair shot at protecting their privacy?

I don’t agree with Umair Haque’s latest post.

Haque, director of the Havas Media Lab who blogs and writes for the Harvard Business Review, says that, just like during the dot.com bubble and the sub-prime mortgage bubble, we’re witnessing a social media bubble; people are ignoring the warning signs of a great collapse.

Here’s the money quote:

During the subprime bubble, banks and brokers sold one another bad debt — debt that couldn’t be made good on. Today, “social” media is trading in low-quality connections — linkages that are unlikely to yield meaningful, lasting relationships.

Haque is worried that the prevalence of Facebook “friendships” are cheapening our notions of friendship altogether. If these social network relationships were in any sense real, then social conditions would be improving. They’re not, so . . . they’re not.

Haque’s right that internet connections are not making the world a better place, at least not if you’re looking for poverty, racism, sexism, and the like to be overcome. People still treat other people contemptibly, especially in online forums, and, as danah boyd is chronicling, white flight (for example) is just as pronounced online as off.

But forming new relationships to fix the world is not what social media wants to do. New social technologies like Twitter, Facebook, and even text messaging don’t bring new people together as much as they extend and strengthen existing relationships. Teenagers, for example, use instant messaging, status updates, and texts to “hang out” with their offline, real-life friends, online. They don’t go looking for new friends.

Haque’s concern is misplaced, but it’s not uncommon. People often complain that online relationships are “thin” or “less real” than real face-to-face relationships. Of course they are. But most online social media connections aren’t things in themselves. They’re ways of making existing relationships better.

And, in my view, they do that pretty well.