Saturday, February 19, 2011

We Are the Social Network - The End of Privacy


From Wired UK:

Today, as social media continues radically to transform how we communicate and interact, I can't help thinking with a heavy heart about The Woman in Blue. You see, in the networking age of Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, the social invisibility that Vermeer so memorably captured is, to excuse the pun, disappearing. That's because, as every Silicon Valley notable, from Eric Schmidt to Mark Zuckerberg, has publicly acknowledged, privacy is dead: a casualty of the cult of the social. Everything and everyone on the internet is becoming collaborative. The future is, in a word, social.

On this future network, we will all know what everyone is doing all the time. It will be the central intelligence agency for 21st century life. As Don Tapscott and Anthony D Williams argue in their 2010 book Macrowikinomics, today's "age of network intelligence" represents a "turning point in history" equivalent to the Renaissance. They are, in a sense, right. On today's internet everything we do -- from our use of ecommerce, location services and email to online search, advertising and entertainment -- is increasingly open and transparent. And it is this increasingly ubiquitous social network -- fuelled by our billions of confessional tweets and narcissistic updates -- that is invading the "sacred precincts" of private and domestic life.

Read all of Your Life Torn Open, essay 1: Sharing is a trap, by Andrew Keen


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