Private vs public on the Internet

Posted on August 22, 2006 by karin

Initiator:

an identity of bits and pieces

In the real world the ability to keep distance between social spheres is fundamental to the ability to controlling your identity; there is no distance in cyberspace. Your info is no longer dispersed among the different spheres of shopping sites, email, blogs, comments, or bulletin boards, reviews. Search engines collapse that distance completely and your distributed identity becomes an aggregate one; one we might not recognize if it came up to us on the street.
There are two ways to react: 1) with alarm: attempt to keep things wrapped in layers of protection, possibly remove it entirely, and call for greater control and protection of our personal information. Or 2) with grace: acknowledge our multiple identities, and create a meta-identity, while still making a call for better control of our personal data.

I’ve been thinking about this very topic quite a lot recently. The fact that I am merging more and more of my online existence into my web page, and linking my web page from my disparate online hangouts makes it so that people can find out potentially embarrassing things about me, if they really dug. Or, if not potentially embarrassing, at least things I wouldn’t want them to know.

It’s really amazing to me the things that people will put on websites under their own name. I can find out who ex coworkers are dating, or just sleeping with. I can find out who people hang out with. I can find out who is posting during work hours. All this, with a few clicks.

I think part of the reason that myspace has such an appeal is that it is a place where few adults (that is, adults my parents age, not my age) penetrate beyond perhaps looking up their son or daughter to make sure there’s not predatory activity going on. But the surface doesn’t show much, the real activity goes on in comments, and groups, and all kinds of other places that myspace doesn’t make it all that easy to discover. I’m not sure if myspace has been deliberate in this way, or if it has just grown out of an expansion beyond means, but it serves it’s purpose: it hides information.

I digress. my point is, anyone can search anything about me. I stopped using aliases years ago, and my main alias, nirak, is the name of this site and also my name backwards, so it’s not that hard to figure out. In the past, I treated the Internet as intensely private and now, I view it as a public extension of myself. I try not to put anything on it I wouldn’t want others to see, unless it’s in a password protected domain. Instead of trying to separate online persona’s, I’m trying to merge them- so the real me is a combination of the stupid, inane posts I make on a bulletin board, and research papers, and flickr photos, and artwork. That’s really what everyone is- even the most intelligent people like and say stupid stuff once in a while, and smart people can be gullible.

It’s not that I don’t have different sides I show to different people – everyone does. It’s just I want to keep those sides at least mostly for actual human interaction.

Oh, and by the way, I may change my mind about all this tomorrow, unlink everything, and say “oops, my bad, I don’t want you to know this.” This is kind of an experiment in openness, one that may turn out to be a bad one.

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