The open marketplace seems to exacerbate the situation, with “people search” sites on one side hawking the idea of finding old friends and classmates, while privacy protectors sell you the chance to delete your data. What we don’t have is a standard privacy policy that actually protects the data you give out to so many companies and social networking sites.
Blogging offers then the type of solution to the private/public dichotomy that Arendt dreads. It does not release the passion of private life into the public, but deprives the private of its fascination and invests the public with a continuous repetition of identical personal experiences.
Many companies that recruit on college campuses have been using search engines like Google and Yahoo to conduct background checks on seniors looking for their first job. But now, college career counselors and other experts say, some recruiters are looking up applicants on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Xanga and Friendster, where college students often post risqué or teasing photographs and provocative comments about drinking, recreational drug use and sexual exploits in what some mistakenly believe is relative privacy.
This snippet from my fieldnotes depicts an attitude that i keep hearing from teens that completely contradicts adult norms. Many teens are content (if not happy) to start over with most of their accounts in most places. Forgot your IM password? Sign up again. Forgot your email address? Create a new one. Forgot your login? Time for a change.
The latest generation of Web sites make a virtue of openness at the expense of traditional notions of privacy.Mena Trott, who developed Movable Type, a software system for publishing blogs, says "control" is a better word than "privacy" for defining oneself in different situations on the Web.
When Krista-Lee Malone, a student at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, did a study of the impact of voice chat on online worlds, women all told her they were treated differently once other players could hear their voices. Yet in a study of WoW, those who used text-only chat experienced "drops in trust and happiness" amongst their fellow players; those who used voice chat did not.
The unexamined life, said Socrates, is not worth living. For a new generation of Americans and more, the unexposed life is not worth living. Digital diaries, online posts, life loggers and bloggers and Facebook and bed cams are increasingly making the very idea of a "private life" sound antique, retro, pointless.
Psych prof Pennebaker says bloggers, who write for an audience, probably won't engage in the same level of emotional processing as they would if writing just for themselves... "More & more people believe they are entitled to behave according to their own values & not the norms prevailing in society," Aaron Ben-Ze'ev says. That means there is less of a need to keep a protected private self..."
One of the up and coming new Facebook Applications is Honesty Box. When you install it, you can send an anonymous message to any of your facebook friends. Only that friend sees the message, along with whether the sender is male of female. The creators say that they will soon add the ability for people to respond to messages.
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The open marketplace seems to exacerbate the situation, with “people search” sites on one side hawking the idea of finding old friends and classmates, while privacy protectors sell you the chance to delete your data. What we don’t have is a standard privacy policy that actually protects the data you give out to so many companies and social networking sites.
Blogging offers then the type of solution to the private/public dichotomy that Arendt dreads. It does not release the passion of private life into the public, but deprives the private of its fascination and invests the public with a continuous repetition of identical personal experiences.
Many companies that recruit on college campuses have been using search engines like Google and Yahoo to conduct background checks on seniors looking for their first job. But now, college career counselors and other experts say, some recruiters are looking up applicants on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Xanga and Friendster, where college students often post risqué or teasing photographs and provocative comments about drinking, recreational drug use and sexual exploits in what some mistakenly believe is relative privacy.
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