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Public by Default, Private when Necessary
With Facebook systematically dismantling its revered privacy infrastructure, I think it's important to drill down on the issue of privacy as it relates to teens. There's an assumption that teens don't care about privacy but this is completely inaccurate. Teens care deeply about privacy, but their conceptualization of what this means may not make sense in a setting where privacy settings are a binary. What teens care about is the ability to control information as it flows and to have the information necessary to adjust to a situation when information flows too far or in unexpected ways. When teens argue that they produce content that is "public by default, private when necessary," they aren't arguing that privacy is disappearing. Instead, they are highlighting that both privacy AND publicity have value. Privacy is important in certain situations - to not offend, to share something intimate, or to exclude certain people. Yet, publicity can also be super useful. It's about being present in social situations, about chance encounters, about obtaining social status.… more
Hi danah, this is a great essay. Both critical and balanced (unlike some of the overwrought rhetoric I've seen).
That said, this sentence in your last paragraph could use some work "It's that the default was not persistent, searchable, and scaled to a mass degree". It's a bit awkward, and I think you might need to unpack it a bit (particularly the persistent part, I've only heard developers use that word in this sense).
Perhaps something like this "But the default wasn't to make content part of a massively scaled, publicly searchable, permanent archive."
Other than that nitpick, this is a great essay. Thanks for summarizing the issue so clearly!
Sociality Is Learning
As adults, we take social skills for granted... until we encounter someone who lacks them. Helping children develop social skills is viewed as a reasonable educational endeavor in elementary school, but by high school, educators switch to more "serious" subjects. Yet, youth aren't done learning about the social world. Conversely, they are more driven to understand people and sociality during their tween and teen years than as small children. Perhaps it's precisely their passion for learning sociality that devalues this as learning in the eyes of adults.… more
Interesting blog post on the subject of social learning:
Social attention and interactions are key to learning processes
http://asc-parc.blogspot.com/2009/07/social-attention-and-interactions-are.html
It makes reference to an article:
[1] Foundations for a New Science of Learning. A. N. Meltzoff, P. K. Kuhl, J. Movellan and T. J. Sejnowski. Science, 325 (5938), 284-288. [DOI: 10.1126/science.1175626].
But of course, Learning 2.0 is generally about social learning. (read on the subject John Seely Brown)
thierry
The Rhetoric of MySpace vs. Facebook
From Eszter Hargittai's scholarship to more recent work by marketing analytics firms, we know that race and socio-economic status shape MySpace and Facebook usage. Yet, it is the rhetoric used by participants that highlights how these distinctions play out. In an upcoming paper entitled "White Flight in Networked Publics?" (to be published in Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White's upcoming anthology on Race and Digital Technology), I map out the language used by teenagers - and, to a lesser degree, adults - to explain the divisions between MySpace and Facebook.
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Danah,
I'd be curious to know what other social networks myspace users belong to.
It makes sense on the largest scale the biggest online social networks mirrors physical social networks, but I wonder if it's more complex then that. There millions smaller online social groups made up of people very specific common interests. Do myspace users belong to these other social networks? If so, which? And do those secondary and tertiary social networks also "replicate[s] the social divisions that exist in everyday life"?