"WATCHING YOU"
The New York Times has an article that nicely summarizes the Facebook brouhaha and the company's commendable response this past week, and raises an interesting question to boot. Titled "When Information Becomes T.M.I." (too much information), the article begins by outlining the Facebook debacle, when it's 9 million plus members were offered some new features:
"That threshold was reached, unexpectedly, earlier this week when the social networking site Facebook unveiled what was to be its killer app. In the past, to keep up with the doings of friends, Facebook members had to make some sort of effort — by visiting the friend’s Web page from time to time, or actually sending an e-mail or instant message to ask how things were going.
Facebook’s new feature, a news “feed,” does that heavy lifting for you. The program monitors the activity on its members’ pages — a change in one’s relationship status, the addition of a new person to one’s friends list, the listing of a new favorite song or interest — and sends that information to everyone in your circle in a constantly updating news ticker. Imagine a device that monitors the social marketplace the way a blinking Bloomberg terminal tracks incremental changes in the bond market and you’ll get the idea.
But within hours of the new feature’s debut, thousands of Facebook members had organized behind a desperate, angry plea: Make it stop."
The piece then lays out the broader premise:
"If there is a single quality that separates those in their late teens and early 20’s from previous generations of young people, it is a willingness bordering on compulsion to broadcast the details of their private lives to the general public.
Through MySpace, personal blogs, YouTube and the like, this generation has seemed to view the notion of personal privacy as a quaint anachronism. Details that those of less enlightened generations might have viewed as embarrassing — who you slept with last night, how many drinks you had before getting sick in your friend’s car, the petty reason you had dropped a friend or been fired from a job — are instead signature elements of one’s personal brand. To reveal, it has seemed, is to be.
But alas, it turns out that even among the MySpace generation, there is such a thing as too much information."
The question this whole thing raises is the following:
- Are young people today, and mainstream folks tomorrow, really, permanently more comfortable with revealing more and more about themselves online? Or is it just a phase they're going through given the novelty of the technology, swept away as it were by the fashionable faddishness of it all?
This is an important question going forward for social networks, done "Web 2.0"-style.
It's especially important as entrepreneurs and investors, not to mention media companies both online and off, race to apply the MySpace/Facebook templates to every demographic segment imaginable.
Anecdotally, the Facebook incident seems to have given some of its younger fans some reasons for pause. As the NYT article goes on:
“Because our generation has been so obsessed with putting themselves up on the Internet and obsessed with celebrity, we didn’t realize how much of our personal information we were putting out there,” said Tim Mullowney, a 22-year-old aspiring actor in Brooklyn and a Facebook user.
“This really shows you how much is out there. You don’t see it until you get it served on a platter to you.”
Mr. Mullowney said the Facebook episode had opened his eyes to a surprising conclusion: “I don’t need to know every little detail of everyone’s life.”
In a post titled "MySpace and Reputational Mortality" back in March, I put it this way:
"I grew up in a corporate culture over almost quarter of a century, that highlighted the importance of not engaging in any communication with the outside world that would be embarrassing for the individual and/or the firm to see in the Wall Street Journal the next day.
In those days this applied of course to snail mail and all traditional forms of written communication, but now of course covers email, blogging and every eventual mode of digital communication.
Teenagers and college kids of course don't have the advantage of this warning, and if they do, are too convinced of their reputational immortality to worry otherwise."
It's good that young folks intoxicated by freedom of "letting it all hang out" online, are realizing their reputational mortality, even if it's only for brief moments on services like MySpace and Facebook.
The successful social networks of tomorrow will need to deeply think through their evolving value propositions as they deploy platforms that make new connections with strangers possible around common attributes, with ever decreasing effort.
Whether mainstream folks are ready to make these changes permanently to their privacy preferences, or just want a slower pace, remains to be seen.
In the meantime, we'll likely see more brouhahas over this issue sooner than later.
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