Sure, people are people, whether online or offline. However, in the offline setting, people have fairly clear ideas of what belongs to them and what does not. Property law is a major facet of most legal systems, and focuses primarily on physical objects; Intellectual property law, on the other hand, has had to sprint to keep up with technical innovations over the last decades. Intellectual property law hasn't even started to crack the tough questions about how much your social network identity belongs to you, or who has the right to utilize it.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (right) represents one side of this debate. Zuckerberg recently ran into fierce opposition from media and users alike for doing what many called an online privacy bait-and-switch: notifying Facebook users of privacy setting changes with a pop-up window that automatically changed user settings when the "next" button was hit. He justifies this decision by claiming that full personal transparency is the new "social norm" - that people want to have all their information available for the world.
"When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard," explains Zuckerberg in a statement posted in an article by Marshall Kirkpatrick, "the question a lot of people asked was 'why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?' And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time."
Others are questioning whether this new "social contract" is really the positive thing that Zuckerberg paints it to be. One such contrarian is the brilliant Jaron Lanier (left), author of You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto. Released today by Knopf, You Are Not A Gadget argues that the aggressive openness of the Internet, while once revolutionary, is now a force that hurts the creative middle class and prevents real innovation.
The trouble arises from what Lanier describes as a new online social contract. "The basic idea of this contract," Lanier writes , "is that authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising."
What do you think? What aspects of your online identity belong to you? Who gets to make the decisions about what goes public? How can creative types own their work and still participate in the "hive mind" of social media? Sound off in the comments!
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