To quote Howard Rheingold writer of the book Net Smart - “Life is a performance, online and face-to-face”.

What is the difference between our online performances on social networks and our real life performances on the street, at work or at home? If we are now performing to the world online how can we make sure it is received in a way that puts us in the best light possible? What can we do if we’ve already put out some bad tweets, statuses or comments online? They aren’t going away as they are often permanently stored and cannot be made retroactively private. According to Internet academic and guru danah boyd, the only solution to previously unflattering Internet posts may be to “creat[e] a digital self that is constantly evolving not to escape but to mature”.

As summarized by boyd in the Networked Self, the architecture of life is comprised of atoms whereas online architecture is comprised of bits. Although it may feel comfortable to shape and share our bits within the cozy confines of a social networking site, we have to remember that the walls can be breached at any time and our digital data distributed freely. Social media houses our information in ways we need to consider before we call it home.

According to danah boyd, there are four main affordances of networked publics or social media that we need to consider:

Persistance: Online expressions are automatically recorded and archived.
Replicability: Content made out of bits can be duplicated.
Scalability: The potential visibility of content in networked publics is great.
Searchability: Content in networked publics can be accessed through searches.

Therefore, the rules of interacting in public online ARE different than offline, and we have to be careful not to ignore online audiences that are invisible to our eyes but constantly present. This audience can include employers, university administrators, police and community members whom you may interact with offline.

Persistence is a particularly interesting characteristic of online interactions, since conversations that took place in the public realm one to one, or one to many, had at one time ceased to exist once they had finished except in the minds of those who received it. Therefore they never received outside its original context, but this all changed with the invention of the printing press, the camera and microphone. Increased storage and broadcasting of recorded public messages online means they can be retrieved and received at any time or place outside of their original context allowing for all sorts of mixed messages. You do not get to choose which messages are spread or which gain attention or even if they do at all - this is a matter of the collective online public’s control over what gains the greatest visibility.

This leads to a further characteristic of online publics - collapsed contexts - where the unknown time, location and characteristics of audiences can make it difficult to know what is socially acceptable and appropriate. Would you complain about your workplace in front of your boss like you would in a public message online? Your supervisor may view the message (or someone else may share it), while you are unaware and unable to adjust your behavior or explain its context. Would you yell out something that you are about to post into the street or say something directly to someone’s face? If not, perhaps you should think twice about putting it online.

If we decide to publish personal information online, we must also realize that the law will not protect us from our own actions online. It is up to us to be informed about how our information is being transmitted, the potential pitfalls, and the effects on our privacy. Reading privacy policies and checking the default settings of a networking site is a good place to start before you release something into the public that you may regret. However, according to Howard Rheingold we can do better and become more aware of the “political and economic environments in which technology-mediated behavior is embedded”. In other words, we ourselves can become not only passive users of networking technology, but begin to demand and shape changes by governments, companies, and communities that can improve the privacy and respect of all people interacting online.


Sources:


Boyd, d. (2010). Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications. In Z. Papacharissi (ed.) Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites, p. 39-58.

Howard Rheingold, H. (2012). Net smart. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Mao, H., Shuai, X., & Kapadia, Apu. (2011). Loose Tweets: An Analysis of Privacy Leaks on Twitter. Unpublished manuscript, School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. Retrieved on November 15 from http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/2050000/2046558/p1-mao.pdf?ip=129.210.115.8&acc=ACTIVE%20SERVICE&CFID=83500791&CFTOKEN=13963530&__acm__=1328588779_85d65fafbc540969d885ea6c8fe0467f

Solove, D.J. (2007). The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet. London: Yale University Press.

Williams, M. (2012, September 14). Twitter complies with prosecutors to surrender Occupy activist's tweets. Retrieved Nov 15, 2012 from http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/sep/14/twitter-complies-occupy-activist-tweets