There is no private life anymore

Image by Judge Business School / judgebusinessschool via CrunchBase

I’ve previously blogged about how social media is leading people to give away a lot more of their personal details than in the past, often unknowingly. This then triggers a backlash (such as with Facebook’s recent face recognition update), but the general trend is towards openness/lack of privacy (delete depending on your viewpoint).

Discussions at last week’s CUTEC Technology Ventures Conference brought this topic to the fore. Serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur Ted Shelton shared his views on innovation, pointing out that the three driving forces of social, mobile and cloud are driving true market disruption. But what caught my attention was his later, bold statement – There is no gap between public and private life anymore. Ted sees this as a force for good – making people more reflective about their private actions as they directly impinge on their public persona. And the more you share, the more people will share back and the faster you will learn.

I agree with the positives, but there are a number of issues that trouble me. First off, I think people are becoming less, rather than more reflective – happily sharing private information that either directly, negatively impacts their lives or alternatively bores people to death. And current technology doesn’t give you the ability or time to build and demonstrate your complete persona online. You have to show just parts of it – your Twitter profile is a few lines, not the length of War and Peace, meaning that by default you need to focus different social networks on particular traits or areas of your life. So, for now at least I’ll stick to partitioning my public and private life – to avoid embarrassment if nothing else.

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