Saturday, August 08, 2009

Didn’t realise it would be about privacy…

So welcome to another Aydsblog post.  I’m not sure who out there in the big wide world actually reads this blog but since it’s also posted to Facebook automagically I’m pretty sure the numbers are larger than when I first started writing.

When this blog first started it was basically just so I could muck around and say I had a blog.  True to my character there wasn’t much of a plan and wasn’t much of a direction.  Which can be seen - even with the small number of posts I’ve made – from looking at the content and how different it is. Some posts are short, some posts are long, some are related to my work, some are related to me, some are personal, some were about events and some posted live from events.  The advantage of this lack of a plan is I can write just about anything and be fairly confident that it will fit into the grand scheme of things.

The question I’m asking myself is, should I be posting to this forum?

Currently I have a profile on Facebook and also an account on Twitter which I use frequently.  Both of these accounts have been great for interacting with both friends I had met before and also, particularly in the case of Twitter, new friends who I’m still getting to know.  An interesting thing has happened which I’ve recently started to notice and that is everyone seems to know everything.  Each group of people I know, however, has a different set of experiences and a different set of stories which make sense to them.  The only commonality in some cases is me.

In the past this wouldn’t matter because the stories were shared through experience, verbally or even in the modern world via separate websites.  However these days that separation seems to be diminishing.  While certainly this is a great thing to happen if the information is simple and of a wide interest (well, to all 3 of you guys who are actually interested in me anyway), it isn’t so great when the information is open to interpretation or requires some context to be understood.

I’ve certainly been surprised a few times at people who have made it known that they’ve seen things I’ve done or posts I’ve made.  Not that there’s been anything I didn’t necessarily want them to know but it was just not something I’d always considered before I posted.

Just like any other piece of new technology we’ve seen eventually the general etiquette, moral and social structures will be in place to guide us in the right direction.  They’ll be taught and learned just as all the other rules and guidelines of society are passed from one to another.  Software (well, good software anyway) will be written to take these conventions into account  so it will compliment how their users expect to interact.

Of course what might be most interesting is to turn that last paragraph on it’s head and ask yourself how much the websites of today such as Facebook and Twitter will change the way everyone defines acceptable communication in the future.

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