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Tuesday, 29 April 2008

Digital publics, Conversations and Twitter

Last week, I left the Web 2.0 conference to listen to Mimi Ito, danah boyd and their colleagues talk about their research on Digital Publics.

Now if you haven't been paying attention, that plural of 'public' there may throw you. Surely things are either 'public' or 'private'? As danah explains:

Just as context is destabilized through networked publics, so is the meaning of public and private. What I learned from talked to teens is that they are living in a world where things are "public by default, private when necessary." Teens see public acts amongst peers as being key to status. Writing a public message to someone on their wall is a way of validating them amongst their peers. Likewise, teens make choices to go private to avoid humiliating one of their friends.

Yet, their idea of public is not about all people across all space and all time. They want publics of peers, not publics where creeps and parents lurk.

Bly Lauritano-Werner (17, Maine):

My mom always uses the excuse about the internet being 'public' when she defends herself. It's not like I do anything to be ashamed of, but a girl needs her privacy. I do online journals so I can communicate with my friends. Not so my mother could catch up on the latest gossip of my life.

Properties of technology have complicated what it means to be in public. We are all used to being in publics that don't include all people across all space and all time. Many of us grew up gossiping with friends out in public and stopping the moment that an adult walks over. This isn't possible when things are persistent. And it's really hard to be public to all peers and just keep certain people out. So teens are learning how to negotiate a world where the very meaning of public and private have changed. Again, this is a good thing. They're going to need these skills in the future.

The day before, at Web2Open, I had heard something similar in the Troll Whispering session. Christy Canida explained that when someone posts something trollish or otherwise dubious on her site, they get put in a state where only they can see their posts, but no-one else can (except Christy and the other conversation monitors). This damps down the flame responses until Christy and co have time to review, and maybe release them, but in their view the post is on the site, but no-one is responding.

This varying view of the web, depending on who you are, seems odd at first, but it is in fact a recognition in code of what actually exists in human attention. We don't all read the same web, we see our own reflections in what we seek through searches or filtered by our homophily-led reading.

Which is where Twitter comes in. Like Jeff, I've been twittering more than blogging recently, and while immediacy is part of it, a far stronger thing is that I have a sense of public there - a public of people I choose to follow and who chose to follow me. Everyone who uses Twitter sees a different, semi-overlapping public, which maps closer to our individual idea of the digital public we are speaking to, and listening to; one that maps more closely what the socialogist and theorists have been describing for a while.

Posted by Kevin Marks at 02:13
Labels: Christy Canida, danah boyd, Mimi Ito, public, Social Cloud, Twitter

10 comments:

Bradley Horowitz said...

Great post Kevin... I've been thinking about this a lot myself...

April 29, 2008 8:33 am
Chris Brogan said...

Twitter as a public is heady. It's very easy to get lost in there and stay there. Despite Michael Arrington calling it a prank/stunt, I think I understand why @gapingvoid walked away, and then came back. I think that makes great sense.

Further, Twitter has become, to me, a public in that almost Roman sense of the word. It's a forum of minds and thoughts. It's a place to formulate and extrapolate. It's a place where there are value exchanges.

So I very much see your point and raise it.

April 30, 2008 3:10 pm
Bertil Hatt said...

IL don't think the debate is about whether one should experience a different, tailored web, but who chooses who sees what and who has access to information about private, censored or otherwise hidden data. Karma points, edition and monitoring, automatic spam filtering. . .

May 13, 2009 10:19 am
Unknown said...

There is a parallel to be drawn with physical privacy as well. We may not want to share what we do in the "sphere" of our own home with the rest of the world, so we create physical barriers for privacy in the forms of fences, walls, blinds, and so on. But I think it's easier to forget that others are watching us on the internet - we can see someone peering over the fence, but we can't watch their eyeballs read our tweets.

Of course way more people can read your thoughts online than could ever fit in front of your fence. Something to consider as we travel about the web I suppose.

December 30, 2009 7:17 pm
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Author Chris Aldrich: mentioned this in Weekly Recap: Interesting Articles 7/24-7/31 2016.
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About Me

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Kevin Marks
Kevin Marks works on IndieWeb and open web tech. From 2011 to 2013 he was VP of Open Cloud Standards at Salesforce. From 2009 to 2010 he was VP of Web Services at BT. From 2007 to 2009, he worked at Google on OpenSocial. From 2003 to 2007 he was Principal Engineer at Technorati responsible for the spiders that make sense of the web and track millions of blogs daily. He has been inventing and innovating for over 25 years in emerging technologies where people, media and computers meet. Before joining Technorati, Kevin spent 5 years in the QuickTime Engineering team at Apple, building video capture and live streaming into OS X. He was a founder of The Multimedia Corporation in the UK, where he served as Production Manager and Executive Producer, shipping million-selling products and winning International awards. He has a Masters degree in Physics from Cambridge University and is a BBC-qualified Video Engineer. One of the driving forces behind microformats.org, he regularly speaks at conferences and symposia on emergent net technologies and their cultural impact.
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