Sure, "radical transparency" includes the obvious stuff, like Linux and Wikipedia and MySpace other well-known "open" projects. But I'm also talking about the curiously quotidian, everyday ways that life is being tweaked -- and improved -- by people voluntarily becoming more open. That includes: Clubhoppers hooking up with each other by listing their locations in real-time on Dodgeball; mining company CEOs making billions (billions!) by posting their geologic data online and getting strangers to help them find gold; Dan Rather's audience fact-checking his work and discovering that crucial parts of his reporting evidence are faked; sci-fi author Cory Doctorow selling more of his print books by giving e-copies away for free; bloggers Google-hacking their way to the #1 position on a search for their name by posting regularly about their lives; open APIs turbocharging remixes of Google and Amazon's services; Second Life turning into one of the planet's fastest-growing economies by allowing users to create their own stuff inside the game; US spy agencies using wikis to do massive groupthink to predict future terrorist attacks; old college buddies hooking up with one another years later after stumbling upon one another's blogs; Microsoft's engineers blogging madly about the development of Vista, warts and all, to help sysadmins prepare for what the operating system would -- and wouldn't -- be able to do.The author is seeking input from the web masses to create his article.
I think this is an interesting idea. Not simply the thought that people want to expose themselves in strange and often uncomfortable ways at MySpace or YouTube, but that it might create a culture in meatspace where people are more open with each other.
Certainly, to a degree I would not have envisioned five years ago, I am on board with that idea. I have made my life very public through this blog, while still maintaining a certain degree of privacy (i.e., no one is stalking me or anything). In doing so, people I see in meatspace know me better and there is more openness -- this is good, especially for someone who is as much a loner as I am.
But there is another side to all this -- some people feel the hot new thing in the future will be anonymity, to be Googled and have nothing come up. This is from Kathleen Parker at RealClearPolitics:
Prediction: The new hot thing in our future will be anonymity.
To be un-famous.
To be Googled -- and to not be there. No link. No Wiki. No tube, space or face. No nothing.
It's too late for most adults -- anyone with a job, a driver's license or a signature on a public document. But in a world where anyone can be known, what could be cooler than not being known? In a celebrity-saturated culture, what could be hotter than not being a celebrity?
You may have noticed that celebrity ain't what it used to be. Where there was once hard work and accomplishment behind one's being awarded celebrity status, today one need only wake up, plug in the video cam and hit a button.Voila! Insta-fame.
Time was, one had to do something to earn fame. Write a best-seller; break a world record; find a cure. Now, one can be famous for being famous. Think Paris Hilton, the most Googled person of 2006.
Read the rest.
From the Buddhist point of view, it seems we are turning the self into a god and worshiping at its shrine: YouTube and the rest. This seems destructive in some, but it also seems that it might be a developmental stage. It might be something our culture is passing through, a pathological (?) variation on the "achievement self." Anonymity might be a healthy turning away from that drive to worship the self.
It seems that these two ideas are probably in conflict within a lot of bloggers. After all, how many people out here are blogging under an assumed name, a mask that prevents complete exposure? While many of us crave the community that blogging creates and not so much the celebrity (though, to be honest, there is some of that in me), there is still a drive to maintain some privacy.
What do you all think? Which way lies the future?
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