In general? Or is it certain segments? A demographic? Social networks only?
http://elitedaily.com/life/facebook-looking-vs-facebook-stalking/602509/
- Since you’re not Facebook friends with this person, he or she did not give you permission to snoop around their page.
- ... when someone reads past the first few pages of your Tumblr, it’s a classic e-stalking scenario. This situation is similar to going too far back on someone’s wall.
This is only a great example, not the only place I've seen this sentiment. It seems popular.
When I was growing up on the web, it was a place of places to be linked and discovered. If you put something up on a vanity page it was solely because you wanted as many people as possible to see it. People had counters to show off how many visitors they'd had. They took pride in (naturally) exceeding their bandwidth limits.
Now people put things online and expect you not to look at all of it. On the old web, scouring a newly found personal site, often including autobiographies, was completely the norm. Now it's stalking.
There are places that are open but you're expected to simply not go to them, as if in analogy to the real world, where there are places you're physically able to go, and words you may overhear, but you're expected not to go there or to acknowledge what found your ears, so as to keep the peace. These things are unavoidable in person. On the internet, everything is deliberate. Or should be.
Do you see the change too? Or am I just freaking out?
This might not be an issue of the web being less open, but a recent change in online socializing. This is my (completely thought on the spot) interpretation: More users of social platforms who set their content as public, are expecting stranger visitors to simply consume their content on a superficial shallow level. Like maybe just gloss through the past few weeks or something. And then from there gain the simple impression that this user is interesting/happening/whatever positive. So it's a bit of peacocking on the Internet. Digging deeper would sorta "violate" the social customs these users are used to. They don't really want strangers to know what they did months or years back, because only their close friends would be the relevant parties who deserve to know that, on the basis of the long time spent together. But to have to tweak the settings of each piece of content that becomes "too old/far back" is troublesome. It's an interesting variant of the online diary. The user wants people to know his/her recent activity, but going further back breaches his/her threshold. Probably why things like Snapchat are getting popular, where the microbursts of content have extremely limited lifetimes. It's short enough for users to simply share their latest activity, yet make it somewhat harder for strangers to trace back far enough. (I mean viewers could just quickly download the content but it's still a significant enough barrier to deter curious strangers)
Thanks, I guess it makes sense in that way. Maybe it's that I see this social media content on the web and liken it to web sites in general, whereas it could be more like IRC or something, where sometimes it's not cool to keep logs and make the ephemeral persist. It's still weird for me though. Seems silly to try to restrict content socially instead of technically. Or maybe it's that I would use social media differently, in that I wouldn't put out anything I wouldn't want any given person to know about me, and in that way I would want others to view as much of it as they want, because all of it makes up the image I'm presenting. I feel like there's a whole different mode of thinking, or maybe a whole different analogy, of these things, which I'm only barely scraping at.
I think that a lot of what ccc is noticing is the natural cultural shift from tech savvy early adopters to main stream users. In the more wild west days things were small and honestly less overt sharing was going on. Even if the web was a central part of your life most of what you were doing was behind closed doors and you were aware of the distinction. The mainstream audience just doesn't care to understand it as much. They see it as exclusively a gateway to social networks. And social networks encourage you to over share and then make it very hard to reel things back. On most sites I know of you can't have different privacy settings for older posts. Because social networks make it so easy to over share and so difficult to hide the past, there is this apparent movement to make it socially unacceptable to look back too far in the past. At best I think it'll give users a false sense of security, but Facebook has already proven that once you have critical mass and become the social hub people feel unable to leave, even if they want to.
Similarly on Reddit (yes, I am one of them...): a lot of users seem to believe that looking at someone's past comments on their userpage is somehow stalking or "creepy". I have literally seen people say "I didn't give you permission to look through my comments history." Perhaps this is all because of Facebook and its sectional privacy settings. Maybe a lot of people who start out on Facebook assume that because there they can publish things that only their close friends or family will see, the same will apply elsewhere.
Today is quote kleinbl00 day for me. In our podcast titled, "Why Should an Honest Person Care About NSA Surveillance," he basically says, "nothing digital is ephemeral," which is absolutely true. It's something I think about more and more as my children age. My digital footprint will likely be available to them and to my grandkids etc. what does this footprint say about me? Is it an accurate representation of me? Thankfully Hubski exists because much of my footprint is here and I'm totally fine with what I've said here. It's my MySpace days that I worry about :) Here's the podcast from which I quoted kb:
Honestly I'm less worried about myself (and a lesser extent my generation), but those that have grown up with Facebook. They're so used to sharing everything I'm afraid they will end up sharing things that will come back to haunt them long into the future.
Sometimes people think you're "creepy" just for making connections and poking around a bit. Like it's a bad thing if you remember something that someone said before, and made a connection between that and a thing they're saying now, and asked them about it, you know? It seems like sometimes people just don't want you to put 2 and 2 together regarding them and it's weird if you do, but if you don't do this kind of thing a little bit, I think it takes away a lot of the fun of talking to people. This sort-of happened recently with someone here, but it wasn't really a big deal, and I'm not talking about them.
I don't understand why people would publish something and not expect other people to see it. That's literally what publishing is for. It's a similar problem that we're having with a lot of social customs that can be exacerbated by technology. Is it okay to ask about someone to learn more about them? Yes. Unless they don't want you to know, and they'll not answer or make it clear somehow. So here we're saying that because the person has the right to not divulge that the situation is okay. But it's also been accepted cultural behavior to ask about someone to someone else in order to learn more about them. When you ask a friend of someone you're interested in if someone has a boyfriend for example. And if they do have a boyfriend how the relationship is going. It used to be called gossiping if the other person might not have approved. But still there is the right to refuse to tell you. With Facebook we have the right to refuse by not posting. But since Facebook is used to tell people things as its express purpose, users would have to choose not to share things at all to avoid this. But you can still refuse to tell people who aren't your 'friends' on Facebook things by changing your privacy settings, or not accepting friend requests from people you don't want to publicize with. It just gets a little more involved because you're forced to modify the broadcast in terms of technology rather than simply being in a room with only people you want to talk with. Someone going into your previous posts to learn about you is like asking a friend about you, but you might never find out. However, if you've restricted what they can learn about you in the first place then they aren't going to get much out of it. Calling it e-stalking is silly. It's as if a friend didn't keep a secret and you got mad at them, but at the same time you're willing to publish all of your secrets online.
Yeah. Even if your friend didn't keep a secret -- if it was such a big secret, why did you tell them? In the same way, I don't understand why people would put things online if they're worried about which people are going to see them. I don't have this problem because if I consider something too sensitive or private, I simply don't publish it, rather than trying to keep the wrong people from it. I often have trouble posting online (especially social sites and Twitter and such where it's short-form) because, unless I write something at least a little substantial and not too much about myself, I feel that it's hard to come up with something that anyone else should actually give a shit about anyway. So I guess this also helps me not to have this problem. I don't post my new boyfriend, job, other life events on Facebook or whatever because it's none of most people's business, and most of the rest don't care, and those who do will find out otherwise. But this isn't the norm, I think. It seems that there's something in the design or in the common usage of things like Facebook that encourages oversharing (or maybe it's The Narcissism Epidemic) but then there are social rules about it, instead of simple tech restrictions. I'm struggling to come up with an accurate analogy for this paradigm of the acceptable use of social network content, probably because I don't fully understand it to begin with.