What does it mean to be public in 2010? Where does does the public end and the private begin? Has social media really changed the definition of what it means to be public and private? Or has social media simply made more private things public to more people than was possible in the past?
Human nature changes very slowly (or has so far, at least by our understanding of time). Obviously Mark Zuckerberg (or someone's fatuous imitation of Mark Zuckerberg) was thinking hard about dollar signs and not human behavior when he said didn't believe in privacy.
Everyone believes in privacy, everyone needs privacy, or at least the sense of privacy, the sense that there is a part of this world that is one's own, if only for a moment. That need carves out an essential space within our society where people are able to be themselves, or whatever part of themselves they need to be in that moment. The philosopher Jurgen Habermas argues that this private space is necessary for the effective development of the public sphere. Without the ability to discourse in private, public voices tend too often to flit between the vacillating whims of public opinion. In other words, people become unmoored when they loose their privacy, or sense of it, and public governance is left without the constancy necessary for good decision-making that reasoned judgment provides.
So why is it any supprise that people are upset by Facebook's attempt to reveal their private selves without their permission? Facebook has become a fundamental institution of our social world providing a service that people might even pay for, the ability to connect and interact their entire social network with a click. But Facebook is not yet capable of changing our desire to have a private realm free from the intrusion of public attention. What media does is it changes your perspective on the world, how you see things, and people, as yet, don't want to see their world free of the bonds of propriety that the private realm provides.
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