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Post-Yuletide rambling: It’s sort of relaxing that I’ll never improve on my first Yuletide story, the Heinlein pastiche. If I were a different person, perhaps with a year’s sabbatical, I might try to write out the whole thing – survival, discovery of an alien race of dubious intentions, trimphant return to Earth – but that’s just not where my energies are now.
I received a complimentary copy of Dan Solove’s entertaining The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet. This isn’t a summary, just thoughts inspired by the book, which contains a number of thought-provoking examples of reputational harms that are possible on the internet. (E.g., the Dog Poop Girl, the Star Wars Kid, and other people whose foibles, while perhaps deserving some degree of mockery – or not – got blown into internet phenomena with the randomness of a lightning strike.)
More generally, the book is about conflicts between privacy, free speech, openness, and control of one’s own information and reputation. Because the internet scales so easily, small pieces of information can get spread to millions of people, with consequences quite different from the ones that ordinarily follow “public” disclosure to, say, ten or twenty people. People pile on, turning even ordinary social sanctions for misbehavior into a virtual pillory, and mockery replaces empathy. For an overview of the same points in LJ/fandom-specific fashion (also, it’s free),![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
giandujakiss has a good post here. Like giandujakiss, Solove argues that the public/private split has always been a continuum, and so doing something in “public” shouldn’t necessarily be license for worldwide dissemination of permanent records of a person doing that thing.
As many reviewers note, the strength of the book is that it acknowledges the paucity of easy answers, but that can also be frustrating.
A side note: Solove classifies LiveJournal as a profile-based social networking site, not a blogging site, which I consider a mistake: LJ is more profile-driven than Blogger, certainly, and the friends list is a key element, but that’s largely because of the content that shows up on one’s friends list –profile alone isn’t all that interesting, and it’s hard to keep friends without routinely providing entertaining content. LJ is actually a fabulous example of a hybrid form of social networking software that is doing interesting things with control over who can see what information, and possibly disturbing things like restricting the ability to search interests on the basis of content – certain “bad” terms can’t be searched on at all.
In any event, Solove identifies the problem of reputation as that scraps of information can be insufficient to judge a person fairly, but we do judge anyway. For those interested in problems of privacy, anonymity, and limiting the uses to which self-disclosed information can be put, Solove’s book is a readable summary of the issues, and his proposals, though not fleshed out in legislative detail, are good starting points for discussion.
And for fun: If you had me under your command and could make me write anything, regardless of whether or not I know the fandom or if anybody even writes fic in that fandom and no matter how crack-addled it might be, what would you love to see me write?
I'm not actually going to write any of these (unless something strikes me), but I am curious.
I received a complimentary copy of Dan Solove’s entertaining The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet. This isn’t a summary, just thoughts inspired by the book, which contains a number of thought-provoking examples of reputational harms that are possible on the internet. (E.g., the Dog Poop Girl, the Star Wars Kid, and other people whose foibles, while perhaps deserving some degree of mockery – or not – got blown into internet phenomena with the randomness of a lightning strike.)
More generally, the book is about conflicts between privacy, free speech, openness, and control of one’s own information and reputation. Because the internet scales so easily, small pieces of information can get spread to millions of people, with consequences quite different from the ones that ordinarily follow “public” disclosure to, say, ten or twenty people. People pile on, turning even ordinary social sanctions for misbehavior into a virtual pillory, and mockery replaces empathy. For an overview of the same points in LJ/fandom-specific fashion (also, it’s free),
giandujakiss has a good post here. Like giandujakiss, Solove argues that the public/private split has always been a continuum, and so doing something in “public” shouldn’t necessarily be license for worldwide dissemination of permanent records of a person doing that thing.As many reviewers note, the strength of the book is that it acknowledges the paucity of easy answers, but that can also be frustrating.
A side note: Solove classifies LiveJournal as a profile-based social networking site, not a blogging site, which I consider a mistake: LJ is more profile-driven than Blogger, certainly, and the friends list is a key element, but that’s largely because of the content that shows up on one’s friends list –profile alone isn’t all that interesting, and it’s hard to keep friends without routinely providing entertaining content. LJ is actually a fabulous example of a hybrid form of social networking software that is doing interesting things with control over who can see what information, and possibly disturbing things like restricting the ability to search interests on the basis of content – certain “bad” terms can’t be searched on at all.
In any event, Solove identifies the problem of reputation as that scraps of information can be insufficient to judge a person fairly, but we do judge anyway. For those interested in problems of privacy, anonymity, and limiting the uses to which self-disclosed information can be put, Solove’s book is a readable summary of the issues, and his proposals, though not fleshed out in legislative detail, are good starting points for discussion.
And for fun: If you had me under your command and could make me write anything, regardless of whether or not I know the fandom or if anybody even writes fic in that fandom and no matter how crack-addled it might be, what would you love to see me write?
I'm not actually going to write any of these (unless something strikes me), but I am curious.
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