Moving Walkway

Danah Boyd has a nice piece on the mass sharing of the “social graph” at just because we can, doesn’t mean we should. One section:

The odd thing about forced exposure is that it creates a scenario where everyone is a potential celebrity, forced into approaching every public interaction with the imagined costs of all future interpretations of that ephemeral situation. This is not just a matter of illegal acts, but even minor embarrassing ones. Both have psychological costs. Celebrities become hermits to cope (and when they break… well, we’ve all seen Britney). Do we really want the entire society to become hermits to cope with exposure?

This is an important topic. How much privacy should we have? Should we be guaranteed any level of privacy? Just because information is available, should it all be trivial to access? At what cost? I expect the genie will leave the bottle and never return.

Freeing information and allowing it to evolve by connecting all of the dots has value, but Danah brings up the reality often ignored that everything has a cost and consequences. The job of a civil society is to make a balanced choice…deliver good to most while protecting the weak.