There has been a lot of concern raised about the lack of privacy in the age of social media and what it could mean to our lives. If you are expecting me to continue the drum beat in this article, you will be disappointed. As the title indicates, I am going to give you a pragmatic take on the matter and why I think complete privacy on social media is not only unrealistic but it is actually counter intuitive.

Lets first address this question

Are we still private in the digital age?

The answer very much depends on your privacy expectations. If you mean complete anonymity like people had before the advent of the internet and social media , then of course the answer is No. But isn't that sort of the whole point? Social media is about sharing , about letting your circle of friends know the kinds of things you are doing. It’s entire purpose is to enable you to share your experiences to the world. That is why it has become such a success in the past decade. I would ask many people who moan about the lack of privacy in these networks to consider why they are still on these networks? My guess is because you want to be able to share your experiences to the world at anytime you wish. Of course, it is easy to see how this can be negative. We are all human and we all have brain farts every now and then and we do have second thoughts and decide to delete tweets or posts. But consider the potential that this has to be an immense positive force in the world. This ability to share anything from anywhere is already having a massive impact on commerce, politics, economics etc and it is only going to grow as more people get access to the internet. So, my conclusion to this question is yes, there is an amount of privacy that we are giving up but that is intrinsic to the concept of social sharing. Expecting to enjoy the positive benefits of sharing but demanding complete anonymity at the same time is like wanting to have your cake and eat it. After all what you choose to share is voluntary and nobody is forcing people to share intimate details about their personal lives.

How do we maintain that privacy moving forward? If not, how do we continue to navigate in this world where privacy ceases to exist?

The simple answer to this question is that our definition of privacy must evolve. That might sound a little bit alarming to some of the you, but it is a reality of the world that technology is booming and evolving much quicker than it ever has in the past and thus our politics, ethics, social values are all lagging behind. This is very much apparent for example in the debate on whether it is justifiable to use military drones to kill enemy combatants. Technology is enabling us to be able to perform tasks that we couldn't in the past and this means our lives styles are changing as well. There is hence some suspicion about these changes and rightly so, I think it is legitimate to be concerned about these changes and have these discussions and debates. But, if you take a step back and look at the big picture, technological development has been a huge positive for the human species, perhaps the most important tool in transforming human development and enabling our species to flourish. So while I understand why people are concerned about privacy, I don't see how the alarmist position that a lot of them take is justified. So, i don't think we need to make massive accommodations to our lives to navigate in this new digital world. All we need to do is understand that complete privacy and anonymity, like complete freedom is an ideal that is unrealistic and it is a commodity that we should be able to sacrifice a little to be able to get a lot in terms of human development.

Do we live in a Virtual Panopticon?

Michel Foucault is of course a philosopher I very much respect. He was a great thinker indeed but applying his insights on social conditioning and identity formation literally to social media is not a fair application. You can read the article on interpreting Foucault’s work to social media use here:

First thing we have to consider is that the reason a panopticon is such a powerful conditioning tool of human behavior is precisely because it happens directly instead of virtually. The fact that you might be directly watched every second of every day does obviously impact the way we live and there is evidence to show that it can affect us psychologically even after we have been taken out of that position of being watched. But putting the word ‘virtual’ before ‘panopticon’ itself does disservice to the concept of a panopticon and why it is so influential when it comes to human behaviour. Prisioners in a panopticon did not have the luxury of signing out of their accounts or turning off their device like you and I have. So, the comparision is a complteltely futile one in my opinion. But, I do agree with the article that when we engage in social sharing we are constantly seeking for approval from our peers and this act of contantly creating a virtual identity for ourselves could be emotionally taxing.

Over all I feel like this ability of any time sharing that social media has enabled us to have is a big net positive but I do understand the legitimate concerns about privacy and its psychological effects. But on the other side there is research to show that people who are more active on social media platforms are more likely to be more outgoing and social in their real lives as well. So, this suggests that it not all doom and gloom. So, I would like to finish with this quote by Penn Jillette: -

“Two things have always been true through out human history.One, the world is always getting better. Two, the people living at that time think it`s getting worse”

This I feel sums up the situation perfectly.