Colorado Springs Community News

On Facebook Privacy and Being Understood

This is a trackback to the always-wise and relevant @JonDale and his blog post today. Jon tweeted at me that my comments were twice the length of his post. What else is new?

Jon: I agree with many of your points on the missed opportunity of a more open, sharing-focused society. My major agreement is your insight on fear.

Where I disagree is with 1.) how Facebook uses that information and 2.) that most everyone is participating in something they're not ready for. It doesn't take much for Facebook to reverse the course of their controls from opt-out to opt-in. We make these requirements of iTunes when we buy music, we sign mindless 97 page terms of service agreements before pressing "confirm" all the time. Further, I can say that I have recently had to go from being extremely open and gregarious to more constrained and thoughtful with my privacy settings because of the cross-referencing of an organization like Facebook. I like my comments. I stand behind my comments. I like what I post. But it gets cross-pollinated and re-distributed via the open doors into other people's information. Social media does not move in linear progressions, but forked spokes. One person can intentionally be driving contact and looking to tighten bonds with one other person, or one group, and inadvertently be severing communication with others. Yes, that's always been the case. But the quality of the communication has gone down as the quantity has increased, and the ability to understood by all these different mediums of communication distribution has gone down as they number of mediums has increased. And that's the bigger point: fear of misusing the system and being exposed as an evolutionary simpleton (ironically, just like everyone else in the experiment!).

We are in a beta stage that is moving very quickly with a mass audience of 400 million plus participating. But let's face it: face to face communication remains the highest and best form of communication, followed by over the phone, then email. Take face to face for example: there is what is said, and then how it is said. Eyebrows and facial temples communicate amazing amounts of information. Posture? Chin and nose position? If the majority of our communication is non-verbal, and things like inflections, cadence and tone matter greatly, then email and beyond are lacking. For purposes of discussion, here is Australian Horse Trainer Bart Cummings... how much emotion and language is being communicated via his eyebrows in a still picture?

Now imagine him in video where you can hear cadence.

Now imagine him face-to-face where you can feel the temperature of his tone, the room, the audience, etc.? I think his horses react and take cues from his eyebrows and gaze... it's a primal form of communication.

Privacy standards and opt-in or opt-outs don't undo 2 million years of human evolution.

In the span of a half decade, we have migrated as new beings who have antiquated email and endorsed these secondary levels of communication as our primary-and-standard. I think so much of the privacy conversation is dishonest because it has nothing to do with privacy; privacy is the cause celebre because it's sexy, but it's the symptom on top of our fear. Most experiment participants have brains that have (surprise!) not evolved to the new primary-standard medium. Count me as one of the many. They/I don't know how to chat, text, or video message as a primary form of communication, and therefore consistently stumble, boggle and offend, and then react to the "privacy" factor which allows all this diffuse connectivity.

Where I agree with you Jon is that the real driver here is fear. But in turn, I think privacy is the easy whipping boy in the media-driven conversation. It isn't privacy at all. It is our inability to evolve at light speed to a new standard form of communication that pretty consistently fails or embarrasses.

What is required of our central processing faculties is pretty astounding, and while there is no restriction on speech per se, there is an evolutionary restriction on being understood. I think that latter part is a portion of the privacy factor: as active players in a mass beta test where the rules get made on the go we are afraid due to our agreements with openness, of being known as failures, broadcasting our indiscretions unknowingly to an increasingly distant, virtual audience we say we know, but really don't.

What Matters Now: 70 Thought Pioneers to Start the New Year

I am an unabashed Godinite.

Others critique him as a copycat. Others claim he's a shark who lines his own pocket with the borrowed intellectual capital of others. Still others are frustrated by his flock of unquestioning disciples that blindly accept everything Seth mutters as gospel. People don't like the fact that his blog has commenting turned off, and still other gripe about his rating system for his blogs because they're almost always 4 or 5 stars, like Rolling Stone rating a U2 album.

But I also like U2. Maybe that's a problem. Or maybe both are as good as their reputations.

Seth just collaborated/edited/published a free e-book. You need to read it. Yes, the Platonic REALTOR is making a demand on your time. You NEED to read it. It won't take more than 40 minutes. Find it HERE:What Matters Now

For all the valid criticism of Seth, like Bono, he is beloved by other folks in the monstrously influential category. Seth used that influence for good in this example.

Click through to see the plexo

Included are Dave Ramsey, Guy Kawasaki, Tim O'Reilly, Michael Hyatt, Tom Peters,and other luminaries in the list above. Mercifully, Bono is not on the list (nor is Warren Buffett).

Why you should read this:

Dignity is more important than wealth. It’s going
to be a long, long time before we can make
everyone on earth wealthy, but we can help people
find dignity this year (right now if we choose to).
Dignity comes from creating your own destiny and
from the respect you get from your family,
your peers and society.
A farmer able to feed his family and earn enough
to send his kids to school has earned the respect of
the people in his village—and more important, a
connection to rest of us.
It’s easy to take dignity away from someone but
difficult to give it to them. The last few years have
taught us just how connected the entire world is—
a prostitute in the slums of Nairobi is just an
important figure in your life as the postman in the
next town. And in a world where everything is
connected, the most important thing we can do is
treat our fellows with dignity.
Giving a poor person food or money might help
them survive another day... but it doesn’t give them
dignity. There’s a better way.
Creating ways for people to solve their own
problems isn’t just an opportunity in 2010. It is an
obligation.
Jacqueline Novogratz is the founder of the Acumen Fund and
author of The Blue Sweater.

Or this: Julie Hagy's ability to diagram, elegantly, the world and it's notions is the sort of 15 second gift everyone needs in a ramped-up world. See her contribution to the left:

If you have a job, you will need to reinvent yourself (if you have not already). If you are self-employed, entrepreneurial, charitably-minded or vote, you will need to reinvent yourself (if you have not already). If you are a person of faith, lacking faith, a muse or needing a muse, you will need to reinvent yourself... if you have not done so already, it must happen soon. The old rules no longer apply. But there are an abundance of perceptual maps collected in this tiny little 82 page treasure that will guide, offend, repel, distill, elaborate, collaborate, inspire, retire, mock and bless your preconceived notions of self, space and time. Yeah, I said all that.

Don't print it out. It's an e-book, and that's part of the charm. You don't need a Kindle to enjoy. 

Finally, to Mr. Godin: Thanks.