From private to public

Eric Schonfeld declares in TechCruch that now we online-nomads live celebrity public life, revealing our private and social life to the public's eye, and denying that fact has no point at all. He is spot-on.

It takes some getting used to the idea of living in public. As I discussed several hours ago with Andrew Keen, in public on Twitter, instead of making the private public, we will make the public private.” When public is the default, you deliberately select what to keep private instead of the other way around.

It’s not that privacy disappears. But it becomes more a matter of emphasis and a conscious decision.

Now it is getting more clear to me why folks in Facebook decided to take a gamble by making all user information public by default. They knew we as users were already accustomed to the public life. Some people understandably got infuriated, but I think this time Facebook will win. After all, they created Facebook in the first place, so they must be running ahead of most of us when it comes to understanding what social media and its trend are about.

I also see others signs of this "from privacy to public" trend affecting our life--we are getting used to it.

• A famous blogger describes her private life in her blog as-a-matter-of-factly and readers (including myself) admire her because of, not in spite of
  
• Keeping in touch with your ex-spouse-girlfriend-colleagues on Facebook, but not on offline, is getting norm
• Twitter, of course, makes everything we say public by default

There were days that we had to work our ass off to show part of ourselves to the world. No more. What needs work from now is to keep our privacy. Another TechCrunch article suggested a gimmick that perfectly suits this trend: Web2.0 Suicide Machine. It's job is to eliminate your profile from social media, notably Facebook and Twitter.

The interesting fact, according to the Web2.0 Suicide Machine team, is that it takes nearly 10 hours to delete yourself from the public's eyes. Which is a great amount of work that will never be complete, since Facebook is notorious for keeping its user data to themselves.

Considering our amazing adaptability, we might eventually (or already) find a way to live as public figures. Will the celebrity tabloid go away, because they are no more different than us? Will we be having better/worse online dating because the "screening" process works much better thanks to the past history records?