One of the many paradoxes of our on-line social life is that to engage, we give up a part of our personal life, we become available to anyone else who cares to look for us, within the boundaries of increasingly better privacy hurdles in social media tools.
In the past, our personal lives were almost all we had, simply because of the inconvenience, inefficiency, indeed, impossibility, of telling everybody, anything much about ourselves.
The earlier incarnations of social media removed those barriers, and suddenly we realised that we had created a monster, a perfect environment for stalkers. All sorts of unsavory and undesirable people, and those we had no desire to know suddenly had access to our details, and so we started designing out the access, but it is a binary process, a filter is “on”, or it is “off”, no “maybe”.
So, how do we design it out? We design back in some of the elements of the inefficiency we had until a decade ago, put in hurdles that need to be crossed before you get to the personal stuff. Clay Shirky, one of the great minds thinking about this stuff does it again in this Zeitgeist presentation from 2008. I only just found it, but the message is as relevant now as 4 years ago, perhaps more so.
