Jemima Kiss writes about how quickly and willingly we surrender our digital privacy. I’m not a campaigner for privacy issues. What interests me most is how our understanding of ‘the self’ is subtly transformed whenever some aspect of our personal identity becomes public property.
If everyone knows (and in some sense ‘possesses’) everything about me that I myself know, does that make me less free? Or does it just limit the scope of my freedom to the interior space that I manage to keep private? Or is it an invitation to identify even more fully with the public self that is available to others, and to recreate that self with abandon?
It’s helpful to remember that the word ‘personality’ comes from the Latin persona, which has the literal meaning of ‘mask’. I take from this the conclusion that it is not so easy or desirable to completely separate the inner self from the outer face that we present to the world. The one that is now pasted over the whole digital world.
Here are some of Jemima Kiss’s observations:
Five years ago a pseudonym was de rigueur, yet now we share the minutiae of what we’re reading and thinking, and who we’re seeing. We are all sliding up the adoption curve to a future where this behaviour will only become even more extensive, more normal. How did our perception of what is an appropriate public identity shift so far, so quickly?
Assuming none of us this side of the digital divide are willing to disenfranchise ourselves socially and professionally by giving up the internet altogether, we have to be prepared to give up something. The free lunch is over; we pay with money, time or behavioural data. There is a benefit, too, because sharing information about ourselves opens the door to the semantic web; the powerful, personalised internet of the future.
Already, from your internet connection to the sites you use, everything you share, search, comment, email, read and watch – every social signal you make – is recorded. The only rule you need to protect yourself online is to commit something to the web only if you would be happy for anyone to read it.
Bridges and Tangents 