Now imagine a whole generation socializing under these artificial restrictions. Can you imagine how stifling being raised under an umbrella of constant surveillance by your peer group, family, future employers and advertisers would be to your personality and relationships? We're developing a society of sociopatic egotists.
We are basically under constant surveillance by our peer group and family, just not in an Orwellian sense.
It's incredibly common for people to grow up afraid to say many things, having massive restrictions on some parts of their personalities due to those kinds of pressures.
We see it most obviously with the single big things such as "I can't tell my religious family I'm an atheist" or "I got ostracised for dating someone from another culture" or whatever, but it's almost certainly going on for a huge range of smaller personality facets - or ones which were blanked out before they developed.
Who would you be if you'd never had any restrictions on what you could say other than moral ones? If any interest you had, you would have been supported in following up, any comment you made would have been taken seriously and never laughed at, any attempt to better yourself was encouraged not mocked.
Maybe more and more surveillance such as you imagine will actually make it more obvious that others opinions are their largely their own problem and don't affect you all that much, and you should develop more confidence sooner.
I was trying to say that maybe total surveillance would feel less bad than occasional surveillance, since you would be forced to "get used to it" from an early age, and for things where there are no particular consequences other than embarassment, maybe that would be an improvement.
(Yet, that only applies if you assume the oversight is only for spotting criminals and the guides for criminal activity exactly agree with your own, and the system is fair).
That assumes that people don't ignore the constant surveillance and largely do whatever they were going to do anyway. Most non-geeks seem to do just that.
(Whether that is a good idea is another matter. Also, I still don't like Facebook.)
For anyone interested, there's a visual novel that explores this idea.
"Don't Take it Perosnally Babe, it Just Ain't Your Story."
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The driving motivation for the story is that this generation _raised_ on "4chan" and "Facebook" shares deep and intimate things with each other _knowing full well_ that what they're sharing may be under review.
Towards the end it implies that privacy is an antiquated concept; and yet that changes surprisingly little.
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I'm with you; whether it is a good idea or not, I can't say. I'll just wait until it manifests in culture.
That being said: I don't like the implications of getting rid of privacy. Not when society likes to latch on to the most unimportant of biases when making incredibly important decisions. (For e.g: getting turned down for a job offer because of some political, philosophical, or religious rant on your Facebook wall.)
If you're going to hold such things over my head; then I'd rather not share them with you. -- And that (to me) is the essence of privacy.
It's why I like Google+ and Diaspora so much. I think the concept of "Circles" or "Aspects" gives the user a lot of flexibility when it comes to managing their own personal idea of privacy.
Would that it were. The owner/admin's made some bad decisions that opened it up to being restricted/gamed and as a result the site is suffering as a platform for free and independent speech.
Sic transit gloria mundi, I guess. Some people cite backroom lobbying by people from places with authoritarian factions, e.g. Reddit and SA, but I don't have the resources to verify the rumors.
That would possibly be true if people had no other way to socialize. Just because Facebook exists doesn't mean that older ways of communicating have all died; the real world is still real, and you can talk in it.
People may have other ways to socialize, but there are plenty of social groups where Facebook has become the way that a lot of social activity is coordinated, and where standing outside means you simply won't find out about a lot of thing in time.
But if you do, be aware that occasionally they get reset to the defaults, just for shits'n'giggles. As happened to my partner this morning. Facebook simply cannot be trusted with anything of consequence - it's up to you to decide what that is, and whether it matters that you're telling everyone you know, plus all their friends, plus having that information sold to any company that wants it badly enough.
