Nick Galvin
Users of social networking sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, are redrawing the boundaries between what is public and what is private, writes Nick Galvin.
John Anderson is not happy. "Going to work tomorrow," he says. "Wife's asleep. No sex today. Again. Hate it. I'm gonna find another place."
All is not well at Mary Redmond's house, either. "My mom called someone 'baby' on the phone," she says, and then, ominously, "Not my dad."
Meanwhile, Sue Choi isn't doing much at all. She's "sitting at the sofa, half asleep" and needs some coffee "desperately".
These tiny snapshots of people's lives come from Twitter, a "microblogging" tool that allows users to fire off haiku-like, 140-character messages to the world about anything.
True adherents can send dozens of messages daily and receive thousands in return. Often they are ridiculously banal, sometimes fascinating, but always deeply personal.
In the most part, they are out in plain view for anyone to see. And that anyone can include, say, John Anderson's workmates, who would presumably be fascinated by his sexual drought, or Mary Redmond's father, who might be keen to know who his wife has been talking to.
Twitter is just the hottest of a list of "social networking" sites that have become one of the great social phenomena of the new century. More established services include the hugely popular MySpace and Facebook, whose popularity is truly staggering.
In July, MySpace drew 114 million global visitors, up 72 per cent on last year, while rival Facebook leapt 270 per cent to 52.2 million visitors in the same month, according to web measurement company ComScore.
Add in the amazing popularity of other sites, such as MySpace rivals Bebo and Friendster, and it is clear there is an extraordinary social experiment happening. It's an experiment that involves radically redrawing the boundaries between what is public and what is private.
Among many younger net users there is now an assumption that everything should be shared and a casualness about what was once thought of as personal information that makes many older people shudder.
"I don't know what it is like to live your entire life publicly online," says social media expert Jeffrey Veen. "But there are kids today who are figuring it out."
Veen has been at the heart of the internet revolution all his working life. Among other things, he has been a key designer behind hugely successful social media applications such as Flickr and the blogging service TypePad.
He says attitudes to privacy and information sharing are easily defined by the generation you belong to.
"There is a generational divide that is as strong today as the divide that existed between kids and their parents over music in the 1950s," says Veen, visiting Sydney last week for an industry conference, Web Directions South.
"People older than 25 years think of everything they do on their computer as being private unless they share it, where people younger than that think of everything they do on a computer as public unless they choose to make it private. This is a fundamental difference."
Indeed, there is now sometimes suspicion directed towards those who refuse to share everything - those who don't automatically post all their family snapshots to an image-sharing site or who prefer to restrict their blog posts to friends and family. "What have you got to hide?" is the implication.
Gerard Goggin, professor of digital communication at the University of NSW, agrees there is now a much greater willingness to share information online that would previously have been regarded as private.
"That's part of what makes social networking or social media 'social' - it's about presenting these personal aspects of yourself to people," he says.
But, argues Goggin, there is a long way for companies to go when giving users the ability to control access to their information.
"My sense is that people want options to control their personal information and I think that's not as well recognised or provided for as it should be," he says.
Meanwhile, the availability of this vast pool of personal information is already having real-world consequences for large numbers of people. For instance, a recent survey found that 20 per cent of employers use social networking sites to research potential employees before hiring.
A third of those employers in the survey by CareerBuilder.com said they had dismissed an application after finding information online about candidates' drinking or drug-use or "inappropriate photographs". A small number even discovered their candidates were linked to "criminal behaviour".
Veen questions whether this is an appropriate way for employers to behave.
"Think back to all that stuff that was in your head when you were 12 or 13 years old that you put in a public [online] space," he says. "Should you be evaluated on that 15 years later, when you are going for a job?"
On the up side, however, about a quarter of employers were encouraged to hire particular individuals after being given a positive image of them online. Predictably, this last finding got little or no airplay when the survey was first reported.
More extreme examples abound of people paying the price after failing to navigate the new rules defining just what should be public and what should remain private.
Take Eric Manis.
By most accounts Manis is an exemplary employee of the police department in Kingsport, Tennessee.
Following this year's annual Funfest - a popular community festival - he even won praise from several members of the public for his work directing traffic and helping visitors.
However, a few weeks later Manis found himself under investigation - because of several ill-advised posts he made to his MySpace site.
"Usually it's about day three before I feel like mowing down people with an assault rifle but this year it seems to be hitting all of us in the emergency services field rather early," reads the blog entry.
This candid assessment of the pressures of community policing proved not to be a good career move for patrolman Manis, who has since been relieved of his duties.
Then there is the Swedish nurse who thought it was acceptable to post pictures of her assisting in neurosurgery on her FaceBook page - and the high-profile British soccer player who told the online world he was considering moving to another club, without first letting his own club know.
Despite these and other high-profile examples, it's impossible to tell whether the sky will fall in on the net generation because of their predilection for letting it all hang out online.
Predictions of dire consequences for rebellious youth are nothing new. But rock'n'roll didn't cause the end of society as we know it and neither will the craze for social networking.
"It's certainly worth asking what is the moral panic aspect of this and what is the real threat," Goggin says.
"Some of it is clearly moral panic based around our myth about youth being excessive. But if you cut through some of the moral panic, the real work that has to be done is about regulation and education."
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