The panopticon is real

First an admittance: I didn’t know who Josh Harris was until yesterday. For better or worse I was oblivious to his existance and his uhm, visionary contributions to the world of social media.

He’s the subject We Live in Public, a documentary by Ondi Timoner, which screened at Sundace this year and will see a limited release in the next few weeks. Should you also need to look him up, I suggest reading his Wikipedia entry, then read Wired’s preview of Timoner’s documentary, and then listen to this segment about the film on WNYC’s On The Media (which is how I found out about the whole thing).

In her interview with Brooke Gladstone, Timoner says she realized Harris’ “We Live in Public” experiment was a precursor of sorts to the decidedly open lives most of us live in the age of status updates and 140-character answers to the question:”What are you donig now?”

She’s right. What’s becoming more apparent as Facebook continues to sign people up is the inevitability of losing control of what revelations can be made from the information we volunteer.

A group of MIT students, for instance, concluded an experiment in which they were able to predict, with mathematical accuracy the sexual orientation of men based on the information made available on their Facebook accounts.

And just yesterday, as I spoke with a relatively I hadn’t seen in months, he told me he’d seen a Facebook update in which I said something about New York, he couldn’t recall. And frankly, though I was in New York a few weeks ago, I couldn’t specifically remember which status update he was referring to.

Meaning he had some vague idea about me which could or could not be accurate based on his reading of the information I was broadcasting (what conclusions he drew from that, etc), and I myself wasn’t too cognaizant of what the hell I was putting out there.

What is apparent is how unprepared people really are to broadcast their lives to an audience of dozens (much less hundreds or thousands), and now that science can be executed to reach conclusions based on data that’s *already* out there, the concern can no longer be at the privacy-settings level of these social tools. The cat is out of the bag.

The implications are more profound now considering many of us rely on web-based tools for our calendars, work documents, email conversations, and more and more, our interpersonal communication, ie, relationships.

When the machine can effectively construct your identity for you, determining pieces of information about yourself not even you were fully aware of yet, and reveal that to the public before it does to you, the game’s over.

Photo by purplemattfish