Trust And Betrayal In Social Media
Seth Godin wrote recently about the intersection of trust and privacy in the new media age. Godin’s a lot more paranoid than most of us, but he goes so far as to sign all his emails “This note is off the record (blogs, too) unless we agree otherwise.” He makes the complementary (and more significant) point, however, that you only have to betray someone once before they’ll be much more reluctant to trust you again.
Go to a party and take embarrassing pictures of your friends to post on Facebook. That’s fun, certainly, but it’s possible that you won’t be quite as trusted next time.
Take that email your boss sent to the six people in your group and post it anonymously to some web gossip site… wanna bet your boss is a lot more careful about telling you and your peers the truth next time?
The good news is that we all need to act as if we’re on camera… behavior ought to improve. The bad news is that it’s harder to trust people we might have expected to be more discreet or engaged.
If you think you can write something or post a photo or video online these days and have any semblance of privacy, you’re delusional. It’s absurd to me that there are still a few Virgin Atlantic flight crew members and a Patriots cheerleader who haven’t figured this out yet, not to mention the University of Texas football player recently suspended for a blatantly racist and threatening Facebook status update.
Mike Proulx recently coined the term “citizen paparazzi” to refer to the fact that we all could be on someone else’s camera or Flip cam at any moment. Bono learned this the hard way recently, when photos of him with a couple of 19 year old girls were posted on one of the girls’ Facebook profiles, and then reposted elsewhere.
Bono didn’t post these pictures on Facebook himself — someone else took them. They were controversial because he’s married, and the girls were 19, but that’s not the issue at hand. At what point do we no longer have any freedom to act as we see fit within the privacy of our own homes (or mega-yachts)?
What do real celebrities do in the face of the real paparazzi? (And to be clear, I’m not talking about the Lindsays and Parises who will do anything for attention.) They hide — behind huge sunglasses, gated mansions, and their agents. No one really knows who these people are — every public appearance is carefully planned and utterly sanitized. I have to wonder if there will be a backlash now that the potential for the same kind of uninvited publicity is ever-present in the lives of us regular folk.
Will social media eventually force us all to become more anti-social?
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We always are on camera. Or did the NSA stop pointing Earth-bound satellite cameras from space?
And you’re no different than anyone else, Jamie. Celebrity is in the eye of the beholder (or those with the camera).