Google Plus and Topic versus Privacy

[del_chan]

So I'm exploring Google+. It's not revolutionary enough to vastly prefer it to any other short-form social media, but I know some people that think it's pretty awesome. If anyone wants to circle up, lemme know

Comments

[del_chan]

I seem to remember a TED video about something similar. While I've met a few people who seek out exposure to lifestyles that aren't their own as a practice, I think the great lot of us are hard-wired to be attracted to media and ideas that are familiar to us. So no, I don't think the internet's helping us seek harder, and there are barriers all around us, but all the tools are still there for the seekers. I think the danger comes when, like the TED speaker said, you have the illusion that you've seen everything and you don't realize how small your bubble has become.

I also think this is a very unique generation, in that we grew up when the world wide web was still new, there wasn't a lot of content yet, and things weren't quite as compartmentalized. Old internet media focused on topic instead of "the friend list" by necessity; there simply weren't enough people with computers yet. I learned to use the internet while making websites, hanging out in AOL chats, and later joining forums and chatting in IRC, where anyone interested in the topic could have their say.

When we started realizing how dangerous full disclosure could be, we put up privacy barriers; sites like LJ and blogs would let you lock your content to certain trusted people (or keep it private), and this made us more comfortable with writing it. After that, we decided that now we had too much content to keep up with, because everyone and their dog could write a blog. RSS feeds started to help with that, and link sharing sites like Digg or del.icio.us were popular for a bit, but they were trounced by microblogging tools like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter.

The decision to make bloggers more compact and relevant (presumably, because you would almost always be interested in people you know) is what opened the floodgates to the general public, but it came after the realization that privacy was important. If the general public had come in before the privacy phase was realized, I think maybe there would be more "seekers"; people who valued conversation with distant strangers and exposure to different things. But shutting yourself off to the world is a lesson we teach a person the first boss that fires an employee for a photo of less-than-moral implications, or the first internet stalker that rapes a teenage girl, or the first divorce that happens when a wife finds a husband's OKCupid account. So realistically, I think things were bound to view people and ideas on the internet as dangerous, both because people like to do horrible things and we like to judge them for infractions we let them get away with in privacy before.

I just wish we had some way to send kids back to the time where everything was new and small, and teach them how to use the internet when it was relatively open and very few people had the geographic proximity or tools to hurt or find you. I can't imagine what a parent does nowadays.