l'esprit

After rea­ding two of the com­plete answers from this debate by Jeff Jarvis and Danah Boyd respecti­vely, I’ve gat­he­red some thoughts on rela­tions­hips on the Internet and why I beli­eve the simplest solu­tion might be the best.

The case I am making is that of how Twitter’s “open-endedness” might be the sanest way of tack­ling the cruxes of online pri­vacy. If we begin with a bit of back­ground, I recently linked to the excel­lent post The Social Graph is Neither, by Maciej Ceglowski on the Pinboard Blog.

In that post he talks about the labe­ling pro­blem of social rela­tions­hips in a com­pu­ter envi­ron­ment, and how they don’t take into account how these rela­tions­ships deve­lop, or deg­rade, over time — unless you manage them.

He wri­tes:

Google, for example, uses XFN as part of their Social Graph API. This defi­nes a set of about twenty allo­wed rela­tions­hips. (Facebook has a much more aus­tere set: close_friends, acquaintances, restricted, and the wea­selly user_created).

But these com­mon rela­tions­hips turn out to be kind of slip­pery. To use XFN as my example, how do I decide if my cubicle mate is a friend, acquaintance or just a contact? And if I call him my friend, should I inter­pret that in the nort­hern California sense, or in in some kind of uni­ver­sal sense of friendship?

Danah Boyd goes on to answer the ques­tion “Question: How much should people care about pri­vacy?” with great insight, writing:

Social media has promp­ted a radi­cal shift. We’ve moved from a world that is “private-by-default, public-through-effort” to one that is “public-by-default, private-with-effort.” Most of our con­ver­sa­tions in a face-to-face set­ting are too mun­dane for anyone to bot­her recor­ding and pub­li­ci­zing. They stay rela­ti­vely pri­vate simply because there’s no need or desire to make them public.

So we have these two spe­ci­fic things. The pro­blem of labe­ling social rela­tions­hips, and the pro­blem of being public-by-default, private-with-effort. Combined they cre­ate a situ­a­tion where you need to meta-manage your rela­tions­hip with a per­son, and by doing so you are pub­licly decla­ring what and how your rela­tions­hip is. The for­mer does, as Ceglowski wri­tes, not deg­rade with time, and once set you need to acti­vely meta-manage that rela­tions­hip again, if it trans­gres­ses into anot­her type of relationship—as real world rela­tions­hips often do.

These two things become a con­nec­tion where the con­tent between to per­sons is con­nec­ted through the pre­viously set per­so­nal con­nec­tion, and regis­te­red, archi­ved and fully acces­sible for the fore­se­e­able future.

I, for one, have disco­ve­red old con­ver­sa­tions in my Facebook time­line I’ve had with people I now don’t have any con­tact with any­more (which is a shame) because the rela­tions­hip trans­gres­sed into a dete­rio­ra­ted state. This could be con­si­de­red being just fine, since it applies to all (that has an account on face­book) just the same. Though it’s really not fine—as all of that data, some­ti­mes pri­vate infor­ma­tion, is actu­ally being used to define me as a adver­ti­sing tar­get group.

Meaning that not only does Facebook/Google+ asso­ci­ate my own con­tent, inte­rests and beha­vior as part of my iden­tity, but also what type of rela­tions­hip I have with my par­ticu­lar “fri­ends”, their con­tent, inte­rests and beha­vi­ors and how that rela­tions­hips might reflect on me (as I am pro­bably more likely to be influ­enced by an inti­mate rela­tions­hip rat­her than an acquaintance).

This rela­tions­hip model has appa­rently spaw­ned its own risk reduc­tion stra­te­gies. Danah Boyd wri­tes, on this topic:

Mikalah uses Facebook but when she goes to log out, she deac­ti­va­tes her Facebook account. She knows that this doesn’t delete the account – that’s the point. She knows that when she logs back in, she’ll be able to reac­ti­vate the account and have all of her fri­end con­nec­tions back. But when she’s not log­ged in, no one can post mes­sa­ges on her wall or send her mes­sa­ges pri­va­tely or browse her content.

This is a very sane stra­tegy if one wants to con­trol the con­tent asso­ci­a­ted with one­self. But it’s clearly insane that you have to resort to this type of actions in order to con­trol your online presence.

This is the point where I pre­sent the excep­tion that pro­ves the rule. That excep­tion is spel­led Twitter. Specifically: their lack of rela­tions­hip labels. You just follow or get follo­wed (you know this already).

Not only does the lack of rela­tions­hip labels cir­cum­vent the pro­blems asso­ci­a­ted with it, the lack of a con­so­li­da­ted iden­tity allows Twitter users to act through a per­sona. Something that we usu­ally do in real life as well, accor­ding to context.

A per­sona allows you to make mista­kes. A fixed/consolidated iden­tity does not. Whatever you do and say as your fixed iden­tity is equally fixed to your actual per­son, regard­less of the con­text of the situation—whether that is a drunk sta­tus update, a joke, or a poorly con­struc­ted comment.

These two fea­tu­res of Twitter, or rat­her lack the­reof, is why Twitter is “doing iden­tity right”, as Chris Poole sta­tes in his Web Summit 2.0 Talk. However, the latest update to the offi­cial Twitter cli­ent enfor­ces the real name field to be shown next to the tweets, ins­tead of the Twitter handle. On the plus side, they don’t have a name policy like cer­tain other networks do.

Now, I am not the right per­son to judge how this has affec­ted Twitter’s suc­cess or not, but what I want to point out with this is that their model is on the bet­ter side of how you should handle digi­tal iden­tity. But it seems to be right, if one were to follow the thoughts of Clay Shirky on the matter.

Although, even with a per­sona, a mistake could haunt you, as one should always remem­ber the dif­fe­rence between a fle­e­ting con­ver­sa­tion and the fix­ed­ness of text in a digi­tal environment.