Det bor en Knausgård i oss alle (Personvern i 2.0-samfunnet)

Karl Ove Knausgård har fått mye oppmerksomhet for sin selvutleverende stil. Men hvor originalt er det egentlig?

I dagens digitale samfunn er jo slik selvutlevering (eller “selvfremstilling”) vanlig. Riktignok skjer det via nettet, og ikke i bokform. Derfor kan en, etter å ha lest Danah Boyds innlegg på South by Southwest, lure på hvor original han egentlig er. Eller om han først og fremst får oppmerksomhet fordi han bryter konvensjonen i et kjent format – boken.

Blogger, Twitter og nettsamfunn som Facebook gjør at vi alle gjør som Knausgård hver eneste dag: Vi stiller oss selv ut i det offentlige rom. Vi velger selv fragmentene vi eksponerer. Og vi står – til dels – fritt til å “remikse” disse fragmentene i en digital fortelling.

Ages ago, Angelina Jolie was interviewed and asked about why she felt comfortable exposing her whole life to the public. She smiled and said that the more she put out in public, the more people stayed out of the things that she wanted to keep truly private.

What we’re seeing is extremely messy. Observing people’s data traces gives no indication of whether or not they are trying to be public or private. You need to understand their intentions, how they’re interpreting a technological system, and what they’re trying to do to make it work for them.

Artisten Miley Cyrus er et eksempel på de nye utfordringene vi får med å forstå intensjonene. Hun slettet sin Twitter-konto fordi sladderblogger “misbrukte” det hun la ut. Men samtidig benyttet hun anledningen til å ta oppgjøret i offentlighet, og som artist er hun jo også avhengig av offentlig oppmerksomhet. Og hvis hun hadde brukt Angelina Jolies strategi kunne hun jo “bare” ha postet flere meldinger, og evt. meldinger der hun skapte et stillestående “image” av hennes liv. Mens hun holdt sitt virkelige privatliv på en lukket facebook-konto eller lignende…

Nedenfor følger noen utdypinger av Boyds observasjoner knyttet til personvern. Hun går hardt ut mot teknologer som mener personvernet er dødt. Og bruker lanseringen av Google Buzz og personvernendringene Facebook gjorde før jul som eksempler på feilsteg. (Paradoksalt nok jobber Boyd i dag for Microsoft, som er en sterk konkurrent til begge selskapene).

Unfortunately, online environments are not nearly as stabilized as offline ones. While the walls in the streets may have ears, digital walls almost always do. More problematically, online architectures have affordances that are quite different than offline ones – persistence, searchability, replicability, scalability. [More info: Chapter 1] Taking these into account is extremely challenging and many people are still working out what it means to engage online given these conditions.

- Unfortunately, it’s hard to be visible to some and invisible to others. People develop elaborate schemes to try to do so. This is part of why people have used handles and nicks online for years, to blur who they are. Yet, as more things become connected and articulated networks bind people together, it’s increasingly hard to walk the tightrope.

- Historically, a conversation that you might have in the hallway is private by default, public through effort. It’s private because no one bothers to share what’s being said. (…) Conversely, when you engage online in equally public settings such as on someone’s Facebook Wall, the conversation is public by default, private through effort. (…) This requires a different set of calculations, a different set of choices.

But, practically speaking, security through obscurity is not as stupid as some folks think. Most people out there never get much attention (…) And for that reason, people regularly calculate that there's not much to lose in making something public, just like they think that there's not much lost in going to a cafe.

But digital architecture doesn't just have ears; it also has a mouth. And one of the most destabilizing issues online is that people aren't good at managing how the system might change the rules on them.

We will continue to see new tools emerge that complicate the boundaries between privacy and publicity, that challenge what we gain from privacy and offer new reasons to engage in public. Neither privacy nor publicity is dead, but technology will continue to make a mess of both.

Det stiller store krav til forståelse og integritet hos de som jobber med utviklingen av nye tjenester:

For the technologists in the room… When you moved from Web1.0 to Web2.0, you moved from thinking about designing and deploying software to creating living code. You learned to dance with your users, to evolve with them. Those of you who were successful learned the most complicated tango moves out there. This is the mindset you need to address privacy and publicity. You need to have a grounded understanding of what your users are looking for and engage them on the topics. (…) But if you give users a sense of privacy, a sense of intimacy, exposing them can be quite costly, both to you and to them. You may lose your reputation, but remember, some people’s lives are on the line.
For the parents and educators in the room… (…) The worst thing you can do is start a sentence with “back in my day.” Back in your day doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you care and that you too are trying to figure out how to make sense of an ever-changing environment. Rather than approaching teens and telling them how things should be, why they shouldn’t be putting material online, please consider the value of opening up a dialogue. You have a lot to learn from what teens are trying to do; you once had to make sense of public life too. The difference is that they are doing it in the new environment. Take what you know and then actively listen to teens. Through their struggles, you can see what is new and different.

For marketers and analysts… This is an exciting era of publicity, one in which you have more access to data than ever before, one in which you can see people who were previously invisible. But just because you are able to see people doesn’t mean that they want to be seen by you. And just because you think you can interpret what you see doesn’t mean you will do so accurately. We are becoming a data-driven society and, in some ways, this is a very good thing. Goddess knows, I’d love to see more policy grounded in data. But please realize that just because you have access to numbers doesn’t mean that the numbers tell the full picture. Or that people will be happy to hear that you have this information.