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"Do Social Networks Bring the End of Privacy?" Scientific American asked in September. The answer provided was pretty much "yes." Over at the New York Times,
my friend Tim Lee explains why this question—and the division it
implies, of a privacy-rich pre-social networking past, and a
voyeuristic dystopic present—is hopelessly muddled.
"People are used to dividing the world into broadcast media
(television, newspapers) and point-to-point communication (the
telephone, face-to-face communication)," he explains. Concerned
onlookers tend to put social networking sites in the first category, as
if everyone were sharing their status updates via a major television
network rather than with a vetted group of confidants. Newspapers and
television do not allow you the luxury of selecting your audience,
individual by individual; Facebook does.
In Tim's telling, social networking sites represent the advancement
of Internet-related privacy rather than its demise... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)