Mike English's blog

In response to Michael Arrington‘s post, The Meaning Of Friendship.

Bucketing and “fake following” are good enough for now.

Why?

Most of this social data will be public soon because managing changing relationship is a huge time-sink, and the benefits of carefully managed privacy just aren’t worth the efforts. I already have to think of it this way – as if all my social data were potentially public – just because I can’t mentally juggle which bits of my data I’m give to whom. (The users most affected by increasingly public social data are the popular users who receive a lot of attention. But they’re also in the best position to deal with potential problems because they can call on their ‘tribe’ to self-manage aberrant behavior.)

There are a number of problems with trying to manage relationships online as if they were analog equivalents to real life relationships. One problem has to do with two things, presence, and the persistence of data.

In real life, as Arrington points out,
“when you don’t want to be friends with someone, you just find ways not to spend time with them.”

This isn’t only true in a binary sense, but actually applies to how we manage all of our relationships. All relationships are constantly in a state of flux. You’re never just ‘friends’ or ‘not friends’ with anyone. The degree and nature of our relationships has a lot to do with how and when we spend time with people.

In the real world relationships are built up by when the two people spend quality time with each other and relationships can wane when people are apart. In the real world, these events are always symmetric. Online, this isn’t always the case.

Online, someone can read your profile data, or your blog, or your activity streams when you’re not there. Depending on what information you’re sharing, this could be like leaving a copy of your journal or diary at every single one of your friends houses.

Getting away from privacy paranoia, say we’ve already accepted that all of our social data may as well be public, one remaining problem is that this exchange is not equivalent to symmetric relationship building in the real world. It’s difficult to gauge online, without the subtleties of body language &c, the exact nature of our developing relationships. When the data exchange is inherently asymmetric, we may find a lot of people far more interested in us then we are in them. ( = problematic.)

In real life, for the most part, data about us is present when and where we are present. Outside of that it’s only present in our friends’ memories, and perhaps though gossip. Online, our social data is like everything else on the web, persistent. Every exchange is potentially immortalized in a log somewhere, and it’s quite acceptable to leave “wall posts” up forever. The social data is persistent, and this changes things.

Additionally, our relationships aren’t only determined by the amount of time we spend with other people, but how we spend it. Besides the quantitative aspect, there is a very important qualitative aspect to social interaction.

To put it in terms of data, we don’t exchange the same subset of our personal data with everyone. Every relationship is unique, because every person is unique and has slightly different interests. Within certain groups some general subset of data may be more relevant, but our relationship with one member of the group is still not identical with our relationship with every other member of the group; each relationship is unique, qualitatively and quantitatively. Even if the quantitative aspect is nearly identical (maybe you go bowling with the same group every Tuesday and you don’t see any of them outside of bowling,) still we couldn’t say that our relationship with every member of the group is identical. (You wouldn’t potentially ask Bob out on a date, but you might ask Mary out sometime.)

To mimic all of these nuances of relationships in both their quantitative and qualitative aspects would require extremely complex granular controls. It would be a huge time sink to manage manually, but I also wouldn’t begin to think I cold trust a computer to do it for me – at least any time soon.

Instead, I find it better to simply recognize that being “friended” on Facebook is not equivalent to being friends in real life. You can say that I’m “Facebook friends” with Robert Scoble, but that doesn’t tell you what our relationship is beyond the most basic level of trust. For example, I’d be out of place offering an intervention for his FriendFeed addiction – I don’t know him that well.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Taking as a given that our old concept of personal privacy is an illusion as Chris Messina does, we come to conclusions that are counter-intuitive to older generations. To re-establish the protection and safety that privacy may have afforded us before the advent of the digital information age, perhaps we ought to fight not for our right to privacy, but for our right to be anything but private. We ought to fight for our right to be heard. Complete transparency, the very opposite of privacy, is the unlikely savior of our freedom.

Complete transparency is only useful however, if one can be heard above the din. If we are able to be heard, and if we are able to forge meaningful relationships with others online, we are afforded protection by the fact that somebody cares, somebody notices, and somebody is there to hear our complaint if we feel any entity is encroaching on our freedom or treating us unfairly. On the Internet, there really is power in numbers, with the rapid and ubiquitous spread of information even challenging the usefulness of permanent hierarchical models of organization. As mankind, are we ready for this new global democracy? As individuals, are we ready to live publicly?