Privacy Isn’t An Outdated Concept, But A New Privacy Paradigm Is Emerging
I came across a blog post by @LaurenFisher of “Simply Zesty” this morning and I felt compelled to chime in with my two cents. The crux of her piece:
The idea of privacy, I believe, will be a completely outdated notion in just a few years time as the days of being able to hide behind a pseudonym or do anything in our day to day lives without it all being trackable, archived and searchable.
Privacy itself isn’t an outdated concept, but we’re all witnessing a shift in what I call the “privacy paradigm.” As a society, technological advances and the foray into a digital existence have led us to a point where privacy has a completely different meaning for us than it did for most previous generations of civilized human beings.
This obviously has far-reaching and significant impacts across the spectrum of life from culture to commerce. In some previous blog posts here on “My Digital Soapbox,” I’ve touched on this new privacy paradigm, especially as it relates to marketing, journalism and chronicling our lives. In a post about potential social media marketing speed bumps, I had the following to say about this new privacy paradigm:
We’re getting to a point in society where a new paradigm of “privacy” is being created. People are slowly but surely seeing the benefits of an open and online social graph (what Facebook is doing with their “like” button and partnerships across the web). There are some obvious benefits to a decreased level of what we formerly considered “private” information, but there are some pitfalls as well.
New societal norms are being established based on social media and the digital world. We’re all actively participating on Twitter and Facebook and other digital forms of communication. Whether we realize it or not, we’ve also established sets of rules for what is OK and what isn’t OK to say and do in the digital world. The most savvy social media users are able to manage their online presence without a set of privacy controls instituted by the service they are using.
As much as social networks are working to “govern by the collective” and form new sets of rules for a digital world, profit-seeking entities threaten to slow the process. Brands are understandably monitoring social media, but the bubble risks being popped when brands actively invite themselves into online conversations without observing newly founded societal norms in the digital space. As much as a cable company thinks that they’re helping by barging into a conversation on Twitter or Facebook to tell us about an upcoming network dispute, they’re not. All they’re doing is being rude.
If we were in our local Starbucks with a friend talking about ESPN, we wouldn’t expect a cable company representative to randomly interrupt our conversation and tell us that ESPN might not be carried on our cable provider soon. It would be creepy. It just isn’t what is accepted in society. The privacy paradigm is shifting and digital norms are being ingrained into society as a whole.
I also mentioned the new privacy paradigm in response to the way minor league baseball reporter Josh Norris found out that a player he covers had surgery. The story went something like this:
A minor league beat reporter for the Yankees announced an injury update via Twitter, someone else asked for an injury update about another player. It turns out the other player’s injury only became public because a fan was friends with the player on Facebook. The reporter didn’t realize this, and the conversation progressed to whether or not a beat reporter should “friend” minor league players on Facebook [to gain access to potential stories].
(be sure to click through to the link if you missed that post, as I used Storify to curate the interesting debate that unfolded).
Finally, my strong feelings about the new privacy paradigm were the centerpiece of a glowing review I gave of the new social media archiving website Memolane:
As the digital age privacy paradigm becomes more ingrained in the public conscience, tools such as Memolane will become important educational tools. Back in 2010, when the Library of Congress acquired Twitter’s entire archive, LOC’s Matt Raymond wrote “Expect to see an emphasis on the scholarly and research implications of the acquisition. I’m no Ph.D., but it boggles my mind to think what we might be able to learn about ourselves and the world around us from this wealth of data.” Perhaps if teenagers become more aware of how permanent their flippant tweets can be, incidents such as the recent one involving Washington Nationals draftee Zach Houchins will be avoided in the future.
No, privacy isn’t an outdated concept, but a constantly evolving one. As we witness our family, friends, loved ones and even strangers having different experiences with the idea of “privacy,” we will adjust our expectations and behaviors. Privacy will always exist, as long as we are conscious of the societal norms and fully understand the technologies and tools at our disposal.
