Privacy isn’t dead. It’s hiding.
A NYTimes article on how technology is shifting the parent-child relationship led punk-anthropologist Danah Boyd to post about “privacy in interstitial spaces,” noting that while teens use new devices and services in ways their parents may not yet comprehend, it simply reflects an age-old desire for privacy and control. Look under the surface and nothing’s changed, so to speak.
While the post was relatively straight forward, a back-and-forth about the nature of privacy between Danah and a commenter caught my attention, particularly when Robert Scoble was quoted from MIX08 as having said, “There is no privacy, and the younger generation doesn’t expect any.” Scoble has a 14-year old in the house so, apparently, he’s come by this observation first-hand.
I disagree. Privacy isn’t dead. It’s layered. When people point to Facebook, MySpace, texting, etc as evidence that teens have somehow evolved past quaint notions of privacy and live 24/7 on the grid, they somehow ignore that all of us—teens included—have used various versions of ourselves to navigate the public/private continuum. The flickr streams, SuperWall posts, and YouTube video comments are editorialized versions of how we want various communities to see us. They provide the appearance of truth while simultaneously suppressing it. (Which sounds much like how grown-ups have fashioned media, politics, and religion.) What teens share on their Walls or in school bathrooms will forever be a gummy mix of truth, fiction, and gossip. In that context, their privacy is both situational and contextual.
So, to Danah’s post and the Times piece, while privacy appears to be shifting, it’s simply the landscape that moved, not the actors. The desire to control what we say—and when, why, how, and to whom—is timeless and immutable.
Acknowledging that is easy. The hard part is the impact on the everyday interactions between kids and parents. Ubiquitous, networked, and mobile tools have reduced the friction of hiding things (which suits the kids) but not yet increased the efficiency of finding them (which annoys the parents). The simplest solution to this is trust between the actors. But in the absence of that (or the shadowy in-between), parents tend to either over-patrol or dismiss the issue as generational. Neither are particularly good choices.
The middle ground is complex. Or at least “layered.” It includes basic rules on the tools and usage (no, nine-year olds don’t need cellphones), mastering the systems firsthand (why haven’t you learned texting?), cohabitation (put the computer in the kitchen), and learning to decipher, over time, new patterns that distinguish what SHOULD or CAN stay private vs interactions that might be damaging, dangerous, or illegal.
Now excuse, me. I’ve got to review my wiretap transcripts.
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Update: Clay Shirk (video): “If we don’t carve out some space for documented personal action that’s “OK,” then we will have robbed young people of something they won’t even know they’re missing because they never leave the net of surveillance.”
Update: Tired of reading? Want to hear an ethnographer call a cellphone a “social prosthetic?” Listen to Norah Young interview researcher Andre Caron on his seven-year study of how technology frames relationships between kids and parents. It’s a brisk, smart interview that’s worth downloading if you don’t want to stream the Odeo file.
Update: a global youth survey finds almost half of all kids maintain a different identity online.
Great post, Mark. If you’ll indulge a longer comment, I’d like to make an observation about why this is even harder than it seems. Real social networks have actual humans as the end points in the graph. Complicated, technology independent humans. I have dozens, perhaps even hundreds of social networks I participate in, and each one has its own complex rules of etiquette and privacy, even when the membership of the network is mostly or even completely the same. In fact, it’s those rules that really define the network itself: the people I trust with my kids, the people I gossip with at work, or the group of cousins in my family that happen to be around the same age. Each of these is defined as much or more by what we do together (the “social grooming” as Robin Dunbar calls it), as by the membership, which may be mostly or even entirely the same. One reason for why these rules especially difficult to express in software is that these networks (especially the ones most established in my life) are typically multi-modal by nature. Take the network of “the people who love and care for my kids”, as an example: some are in FB, some are email-only, and some (like my Gramma) offline entirely. We humans are very typically very good at picking up on and managing these social “rules”, but often have difficulty migrating those rules to a new or unfamiliar modality of communication.
fergusson
March 17, 2008 at 2:33 pm
Michael: You’re on track, though. You understand the crevices of the landscape. That makes the dialogue with your kids far more fluent, which in turn a) increases their trust in you, since you know what they know, and b) aware of your awareness, which (in a good way) is slightly intimidating.
The real trouble arises when parents become overwhelmed by the grid. Once they back away it creates the moral equivalent of non-parenting which, at the wrong time or place, can be devastating.
Services that, implicitly or explicitly, teach parents about the system as they use the system are a major opportunity for service designers. In fact, the whole family 2.0 space is underserved given its importance (which you know better than most
mark2one
March 17, 2008 at 4:30 pm
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