Some of it has to do with Steven Hodson's post on "lifestreams" --who's promoting the idea, and a dangerous, dark side to all of it:
At first this idea of lifestreams might seem to be nothing more than ego puffery and a legitimate way to keep track of what you are doing around the web but what happens when some-one other than you creates your lifestream. After all who else could care enough to know what you are doing all over the web.
Steven points out in his post, that there are lots of people who might be interested in this information, not just you and your ego. Nefarious marketers and identity thieves are the most obvious. Paranoid potential employers (for whom a legal background check might not be enough) are another. And then there's the FBI and those kinds of folks who are looking for "terrorists" under every rock...(even though they've probably had their own ways of making our information talk for longer than we're aware.)
and what could happen if something--like a mixup in identity--happens (think Brazil)
Because there are no guarantees with search and the gathering up of personal intelligence--even Google's supposed timeliness of the entries in its index can't be guaranteed...
A couple of weeks ago, I got an invitation to Spock and I started the registration, but something kept me from completing it. I enjoy following my "profile" online, but I'm also starting to worry about the aggregation of me....
The majority of us might not be ready to have so much of our information--so much of our selves--searchable by anyone for any purpose. Yet it's not just that we're not ready, it's also that we don't fully know or understand what's going on. We are bombarded, daily, with all sorts of requests for our information, so many requests to register for this or that site in order to just leave a comment or have our voices heard. We are bombarded with hype(esp. if you're in certain industries) how we must be doing this or that with our online selves.
We are even told that, in this incredibly competitive job-world, that we *must* be online, lest we miss out on potential employment.
Eventually, the transparency many of us believe is an important aspect of our blogging and our reputations online, may suffer...because none of us is perfect, and sometimes that imperfection bleeds out... Can we trust others not to hold that untowardly information against us in some way? I'm not sure...
On Friday, danah boyd wrote an important post on controlling your public appearance:
Carefully crafting and cautiously managing one's public image is a critical aspect of living in a mediated public world. Every advice column I've read warns people of the dangers of living online. I think that this is idiotic. People need to embrace the world we live in and learn to work within its framework. Don't panic about being public - embrace it and handle it with elegance.
She's very right--yet this somehow echoes what adults of past offline generations had to do, if they were going to climb both the corporate and social ladders that were/are part and parcel to achiveing what is considered the American Success Dream. I remember some advice from the last century about never going to a psychiatrist, lest your employer or others find out and thus believe you to be "mentally unstable." While in many realms this is no longer such a big deal (good mental health being almost like good oral hygene) we are now confronted with the necessity of monitoring our online lives and creating an identity/self/personna that is socially acceptable.
That is, if we want to be accepted socially....
So I am brought back to the idea of online civility--and perhaps all these reputation management things are a way of forcing online civility. From my own experiments with my online identity, I've found that to express one's mind in criticism of others can end up branding one as "unable to play nicely with others" (as well as other untowardly euphemisms) as much as it can bring one attention....
And I've found a curious irony--how some folks with very high reputations, and very carefully crafted online personnas, may use anonymity to level criticisms (whether on blogs or in comments on blogs or other places online.)
Because the pressure to be nice is, perhaps, quite a bit stronger out here than we are be lead to believe by all the hew and cry an hype, hype, hype...and for someone who's personna is one of nice might not want a verbal nasty to get out from under that joucular veneer...
All is often not what it appears to be.
So, I am left with the decision about what to do about my online reputation. My Google results are very good--and I'm happy with that. Yet I'm not sure I want one-stop-shopping by some entity other than Google. I don't know if I want a "lifestream" of me out there--even if that "lifestream" might keep me from getting invited into some secret society of kewl kidz.
Maybe in some ways it's not worth it.
We are not all Paris Hilton or Hunter S. Thompson or William S. Burroughs. Clara Bow was never totally forgiven....and Chaplin ended up leaving the country...
Maybe we all need to think about very, very carefully and very, very seriously about online reputation aggregators....maybe we need to be more pro-active and dam up the lifestreams out there before they become raging torrents that threaten social destruction....maybe the "opt out" choice is the most important one we can do for our Selves...
maybe so...
Update There's lots and lots of discussion going on re all of this, but I'm reminded of something I found out about (and wrote about) in December: marketing intelligence company Umbria's Umbria Connect program that sifts through blogs for customers, gathers up urls, and sells them in lots of 25. I was bothered by this--esp. about the selling of my url. But there were others who said that the urls are "public information" that anyone can get anyway. So what if a company was gathering them and selling them? Perhaps what we're seeing with Rapleaf and others is a step above--the next step--of information gathering-up that may have been spurred on by ideas like Umbria Connect. I don't really know for sure. Just something to think about.
No comments:
Post a Comment