This article is part of a virtual reading group for Daniel Solove’s book The Future of Reputation (schedule here).

people’s online social networks may be only an “imaginary” community

Class after class of students come through the small college where I work. They pour out their hearts into the digital blackness and spend their time with socially networked acquaintances; their conversation comes in fast spurts over AIM. Their relationships are increasingly weak and standoffish at the same time that what they reveal of themselves to the public is incredibly intimate. Secrets that they would hate for their parents to see are only a Google search away. Do they realize that those hasty admissions—ideals that will change, relationships that will sour, drunken indiscretions—will all be preserved like fossils in the digital strata for their entire lives and beyond? In a virtual world designed around speed, convenience, and ego, they will loose a sense of what constitutes a strong relationship and their ability to empathize will suffer. At a time when it is easier than ever to find a reason to hate someone, they will be more likely than ever to be willing to hate. How can we—as mentors, as parents, as developers, as netizens—put a stop to this progression?

The Internet is a Cruel Historian

My wife used to write online about our son, who was a baby at the time. Her journal was ‘onymous,’ meaning she made it a point of pride to use her real name. The stories she wrote were the sorts of thing that any parent would share about a baby—harmless amusing anecdotes, pictures, and such. As time went on, we had to think of something that parents before us had never considered. What will our son do when these funny baby stories are still available within seconds of a search when he is in high school? Or when he applies for his first job out of college? Or when he’s middle-aged and looking to distinguish himself in a profession? How will these stories effect his ability to find love or to raise his own children?  Fortunately, she put a lot of thought into where to draw the line on what was shared and what was held back, but many—probably most—parents won’t have that discretion.

Time as a Context and the Usefulness of Forgetting

Our reputation is an essential component to our freedom, for without the good opinion of our community, our freedom can become empty.

Many of us may have had parents who jokingly pulled out the family photo album to show our significant others embarrassing baby photos. It’s a poignant moment, when someone you love can laugh at pictures of you as a tender, vulnerable youth. It never occurs to us that mom may have showed these pictures around her office to near strangers when the pictures were newly made—they weren’t taken for the sole purpose of gathering dust in a photo album, after all. Sharing fun moments is part of the reward of being a parent, but the way we share is changing faster than our consideration for how, why, and with whom we choose to share our personal lives. The internet is ageless and its memory does not dim like a human memory does. The ability for endless lossless copies creates a further complexity.

Yesterday a friend of mine IM’ed me a link to a lifehacker.com article on Adobe’s Zoetrope, which is shaping up to be like the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine. In other words, it’s a second and more robust attempt at archiving the internet and tracking changes across time in a way that will allow a user to browse a website through time with ease. Part of me recoiled in horror at this, and I was relieved that Adobe has not been archiving the internet, nor does it plan to move beyond a few high-profile websites. Still, with computer memory capacity, processing capability, and bandwidth getting cheaper and cheaper, it is only a matter of time before a company like Google—who already caches copies of nearly every webpage it crawls—to maintain a detailed, searchable, and browsable archive.

Part of growing up is the ability to move on—to change social contexts at different life stages. This is an ancient truth: “Whence hath this man this wisdom, and these mighty works? Is not this the carpenter’s son?” Starting fresh in a new place allows a person to re-invent themselves without the burden of memory, and this is especially important for young people. Solove said:

We may find it increasingly difficult to have a fresh start, second chance, or a clean slate. We might find it harder to engage in self-exploration if every false step and foolish act is chronicled forever in a permanent record. [...] As people chronicle the minutia of their daily lives from childhood onward in blog entries, online conversations, photographs, and videos, they are forever altering their futures—and those of their friends, relatives, and others.

I have had several discussions in my office about the need for colleges and high schools to begin counseling students on how they craft online identities and how to use pseudonyms for identity exploration that may come back to haunt them in the future. After all, what is appropriate to share online is still a decision that many adults cannot make intelligently—expecting experimenting teenagers to be responsible for creating immortal reputations online is impossible. Solove says, “For most of us, the foolish things we do as teenagers disappear into oblivion and are revived only when we reminisce with old friends. But in today’s world, foolish deeds are preserved for eternity on the Internet.”

In my case, I was lucky enough to have spent my formative period online before Google and the Internet Archive—the internet did slowly forget my teenage years (thankfully). However, with new tools like Zoetrope and whatever ultimate librarian succeeds it, there is little hope that the information revealed about us online will ever fade. Worse, my colleagues here at Warren Wilson seem totally disinterested, and I imagine the situation at public schools is much more bleak. It seems the ‘Google generation’ will have to fend for itself because too few people today are aware of these issues at all.

The Fallacy of ‘Nothing to Hide’

Daniel Solove asks a sticky question: “Is there a justification for allowing people to conceal information
about themselves that will lower their reputations?” He goes on to discuss what reputation means and how using Google to build an opinion about someone in a matter of minutes is not reputation—at least not in the sense that society has relied on reputation for centuries. One key to reputation is that it is built largely on strong relationships between people who have known each other for a long time—that is the only guarantee that reputation is accurate. The problem with using Google to form an image of a person in moments is that there are only random fragments to draw from. It is foolish to think that we can know something of a person’s reputation from a Google search when a sense of ‘integrity’ would be impossible to convey believably from such a hodge-podge of scanned data. Solove discusses how we are living today in a ‘global village’ in the sense that we have access to all sorts of personal information about each other that used to only be commonly available to members of a small community. He says:

The global village not only revives features of the small village but also amplifies and alters them in profound ways. The global village is worldwide and it encompasses millions of people. The people of the global village have weak rather than strong ties; they are often known not for their whole selves but for various information fragments others hastily consume.

The Social Industry

I have lost the immortal part of my self and what remains is bestial.

My wife and I frequently reminisce about how we met in a CGI chatroom. At the time, the internet was still in its youth, and we formed a relationship from chatting for hours both alone and in a group. That sort of relationship-building happens more and more rarely online. Chatting has changed into Instant Messaging and the way it is commonly used is nothing like the long, soul-searching chats I remember. Social networks are designed to foster a large quantity of shallow relationships between acquaintances. Social networking activities are generally very surface-oriented, topical, and fast. As a result, it is increasingly unlikely that real, deep, and lasting relationships will be formed online. Solove points out, “when little is invested in a personal relationship, even information that is incomplete and of dubious veracity might be enough to precipitate ridicule, shunning, and reproach.”

Relationships mean less on the internet, and damaging someone else’s reputation becomes less serious at the same time that it becomes much easier. At a time when families are shrinking and the support systems that our ancestors enjoyed from community are missing, the internet is doing more harm than good in our social lives by turning socialization into shallow, monetized entertainment. It’s high time we had a social network designed to build real-life, deep connections between people. If we can learn about what it means to live and love meaningfully in a virtual world, perhaps we can better appreciate reputation (and each other) in a virtual context.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 at 11:39 pm and is filed under Electronic Culture, Feature: Books, Feature: Market Moment, Features, Youth Culture. It has been viewed 1306 times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

From ‘A Softer World’

There is an argument made against privacy that says someone who isn’t engaged in criminal behavior has nothing to hide. This method of thinking allowed the US government to slowly sap away our civil liberties in the wake of the 9/11 attacks–many have just accepted that trading privacy for security is acceptable and used the “nothing to hide” argument to rationalize what was, essentially, a decision based on fear. However, limiting the government’s ability to intrude in our private lives is easy compared with attempting to control how personal information spreads on the internet via gossip. Rather than spies or wiretaps, gossip is often gathered by those we trust and spread online by people who don’t understand or appreciate the potential for the damage it can do. In reality, privacy is about much more than concealing wrongdoing.

Internet-based abuse (‘cyberbullying’) and privacy / relationship issues are still massively misunderstood. The complexities of online sociality are probably the biggest ‘generational divide’ between modern teens and adults. To help put it in perspective a bit, here are some numbers…

I HAVE A MYSPACE ACCOUNT!!1!