Sunday, April 5, 2009

Privacy and the Internetz

Twitter. The new rage of the internet world. A place where one can tell us about the important things in life. Like how much they hate something that happened to them, what a bad day they are having, where they are, or describing their surroundings all in a mere 140 characters. Oh and did I mention that people can become your followers and track every single thing you submit to Twitter?

Besides being incredibly creepy, and slightly stalkerish, Twitter has a nice service going. It allows people to follow people who want to know stuff about these people, including their mundane tasks/thoughts that they just feel like posting. However, it does bring up many questions about the ethics of privacy and also whether what these twitters really are.

I bring this up because I just recently saw an article about how some coach is getting sued by referees about his comments on their calls. Twitter does not have the privacy of Facebook and allows anyone who has a link to a user's page to view their twitters. So this basically makes any comments on the site public and easily accessible. However, does it make it right to sue someone based on their one off opinion? The site is meant to express random thoughts and that is exactly what the coach did. Of course the comments may have broken some kind of contract about sportsmanship, but this brings up a whole new idea on what can and cannot be used against oneself. Much like the Facebook and Myspace scandals involving comments, where people have been prosecuted for mere cheeky comments against someone else, these new lawsuits are bringing forth a big question for our generation of web junkies: What is private anymore?

In the pre-internet world, privacy was a much more black and white thing. We could do what we wanted and say things to others that were often not correct, but didn't hurt anyone and were often just stupid comments. In our new age, we leave a trail on the internet. Anything we say to others through our new online social lives are recorded in some way. We all leave some sort of path, whether it is through the pictures we post online, the blogs we write on ever so diligently, or even instant message conversations.

What this seems to suggest is that our society needs to shift. Though we already often insanely overly politically safe in our words we still seem to see some places as private, or at least not serious. However, recent cases, such as the ones mentioned earlier, seem to destroy this idea. Should the internet be a place where every statement becomes like a public statement? Or is it still just opinions that have no meaning? Because in most cases, the prosecution attacks opinions that were based on messages that seemed quite serious to the receiving audience. They were not posted news articles or serious blogs, but mere posts on a social networking site.

Just thought I would put that out there. Wondering what you think.

1 comment:

bcope said...

Response to last two posts. Back in top form Daniel. Both of these posts (privacy & Rope) were well composed and reflective. In particular, your response to Rope was a model of how to respond to a work of art, how art can instigate questioning and perhaps shape one's world view.

Fantastic work.

PS I hate twitter. But maybe that's because I don't have a blackberry (yet).