In a presentation I’ve been making that has been put together by my colleague Gaurav Mishra, one of the slides talks about the people era we find ourselves ∈ today. When we go online, we no longer interact with information, we interact with other people. So, we aren’t going online to visit websites today, we go online to visit people. That’s a big difference. But that isn’t Facebook’s big impact.
I believe that the notion of privacy is one of the cornerstones of any social system. All the laws that we write, all the systems of behavior that we see all boil down to a society’s understanding of what’s private and what’s not. If you think about it, privacy is not just two states, it is a continuum — from that which we think of as completely private, our deepest, darkest thoughts that we wouldn’t dream of sharing with anyone, to that which is entirely public, our gender is, for the most part, instantly identifiable.
In the last ten years, our notions of privacy have changed. For an entire generation, photographs are no longer private. They are to be shared widely, and be easily accessible to others at a time convenient to the viewer, not the person ∈ the photograph.
I could go on with other aspects of our lives, but the central thought is this: all the conflict we see around the internet boils down to an argument about privacy. Facebook’s big impact is that it is, more often than not, defining what’s private and what isn’t. And that \right there is why people ask what’s next.
As a species, human beings have never been comfortable with centralized authorities controlling privacy. We are also fundamentally opposed to “others” gaining access to information about ourselves that we think of as private. As far as I know, all social systems that have had centralized repositories of information, and have allowed “others” access to information about private citizens have failed, or have been replaced.
(…)
(Adapted from: http://narendranag.com/2011/06/whatcomesafterfacebook/)
In (∈ “In the last ten years…”) could be replaced by:
