Private Conversations in Public Places
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Back in Oct 2007, I wrote about the importance of helping users to more carefully negotiate private social experiences in public places online (like Facebook).
Now people are deliberately engaging in direct one-to-one conversations in public forums because we are beginning to realize that there is more value in sharing information online than there is in keeping secrets.
In some cases, mostly on Facebook, the participants are barely conscious of the public nature of their discussions. Almost every action in Facebook, with the exception of direct messages, is broadcast to both participants' entire networks. Everyone sees a note in their news feed when they log in saying, "___ left a comment on ___'s relationship status" or "___ posted a link on ___'s wall" or "___ left a comment on ___'s photo." All of these micro-conversations are personal to the two participants involved. Yet, they invite public discussion.
On Twitter our decision to have public or private conversations is binary. Either we keep our conversation a secret by using a "D" (direct message) or we share them with the rest of our followers with the "@" (reply). When we choose to have conversations in public, we discover new shared interests with our followers, strengthening those ties (if only by a little). My friend and I may have just gone to see a movie together, and when we get home I find a funny trailer mashup of that movie. I send out a Twitter message with the link, beginning with an "@" to reply in public to my friend. Turns out several of my other followers saw that movie recently, too. They reply to me with their thoughts, and a link to another trailer mashup. We discover new shared interests, and those other relationships become just a little bit more meaningful.
This is why we're engaging in what we would have, in the past, assumed to be private conversations in public places. By opening up any discussion that isn't highly sensitive, we invite new discoveries and potential relationships. Our mindset is making a fundamental shift. This shift follows the natural progression of internet communications. By sharing our knowledge in public, we earn attention, we strengthen our reputation, and we build relationships, all of which are ultimately more valuable than any one of our ideas probably ever was.
Our default mode is now, "When in doubt, share."
Now people are deliberately engaging in direct one-to-one conversations in public forums because we are beginning to realize that there is more value in sharing information online than there is in keeping secrets.
In some cases, mostly on Facebook, the participants are barely conscious of the public nature of their discussions. Almost every action in Facebook, with the exception of direct messages, is broadcast to both participants' entire networks. Everyone sees a note in their news feed when they log in saying, "___ left a comment on ___'s relationship status" or "___ posted a link on ___'s wall" or "___ left a comment on ___'s photo." All of these micro-conversations are personal to the two participants involved. Yet, they invite public discussion.
On Twitter our decision to have public or private conversations is binary. Either we keep our conversation a secret by using a "D" (direct message) or we share them with the rest of our followers with the "@" (reply). When we choose to have conversations in public, we discover new shared interests with our followers, strengthening those ties (if only by a little). My friend and I may have just gone to see a movie together, and when we get home I find a funny trailer mashup of that movie. I send out a Twitter message with the link, beginning with an "@" to reply in public to my friend. Turns out several of my other followers saw that movie recently, too. They reply to me with their thoughts, and a link to another trailer mashup. We discover new shared interests, and those other relationships become just a little bit more meaningful.
This is why we're engaging in what we would have, in the past, assumed to be private conversations in public places. By opening up any discussion that isn't highly sensitive, we invite new discoveries and potential relationships. Our mindset is making a fundamental shift. This shift follows the natural progression of internet communications. By sharing our knowledge in public, we earn attention, we strengthen our reputation, and we build relationships, all of which are ultimately more valuable than any one of our ideas probably ever was.
Our default mode is now, "When in doubt, share."
2 Comments:
I'm not sure I completely agree with the idea we're shifting our communications. I think our notion of a private vs public space is at the center of these behaviors. Twitter is a decidedly public space. Facebook is more private. danah boyd calls this type of space a networked public.(she also says there are only three conditions of space: public, private, and controlled)
"Public interactions are negotiated in front of invisible audiences. In physical environments, we can look around us and get a sense of who might be hearing our conversations. Online, this is not so possible."
http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/MacArthur2008.html
you're absolutely right, bud, that there is an important difference between the public-ness of Twitter messages and Facebook comments. Facebook happens within a closed network, and Twitter is literally for anyone on the internet to find.
in spite of their different scales, though, i still believe that they are both indicative of a broader shift in the way we communicate. Both of the those kinds of exchanges that happen now on Twitter or Facebook, would have been relatively completely private before the internet came along.
maybe our idea of what's public vs. private is just different now? we're just broadening our concept of what a "private" conversation could be, i.e. a comment on Facebook that is broadcast to my entire network is relatively private now.
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