Monday, March 17, 2014

My Public is not my Father's Public

An article I found interesting this week that related to the in class discussions focused on privacy issues related to Twitter. While it seems like a fairly basic idea—your tweets are either public or private, it’s actually a far more complex issue.

The article focused on the idea that tweets are being re published without any sort of permission, regardless of the content. The author suggests that tweets should not be held in the regard as previous forms of communication. While everything is ‘public’, it shouldn’t mean everyone is free to do what they want. Social media exists in a world between private and public. These sites and applications wouldn’t function if they were either completely public or private, so there should be some limits without having to go completely private.

The bigger issue this article points at is our shifting perceptions of ideas about what should be public, and what should be private. Only a decade or so ago, what the average person shares online would likely seem ludicrous. We are essentially living two lives, and one of them is free for anyone to view.

The impact of this has yet to be seen, and likely won’t be for a good many years. How will people feel that access their entire “virtual” lives online? Will nostalgia become irrelevant, when you can look back and see exactly what you were doing at any given point in time?

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