In the collapsed contexts of the online world, people are finding that they can experiment with the actual paradigms they live by…

In “a very interesting exploration of social networking sites”:http://www.danah.org/papers/FriendsterMySpaceE…, danah boyd talks (among other things) of two concepts that fascinate me: the ‘super public’ — the idea of a local community grown so large and tightly knit that people with vastly differing ideas come into contact on a daily basis — and collapsed contexts — when the social supports for these differing ideas degrade as a result of interaction.

Many of us who use the Internet have our own ‘digital divide’: our digital persona, which for many people is more open and daring than our analog persona, which must deal with much more rigid and structured social contexts. In the ‘real world’, we deal much more viscerally with the values of our parents, our friends, our co-workers than we do in this new ‘digital world’ that pushes free expression as a high moral value.

Much has been made in broadcast news of teenagers posting racy pictures on MySpace, but why? In the context of of teenage behaviors alone, we’re all aware that people of that age are experimenting with their own sexuality; in the ‘real world’ we have a tacit agreement that they do it where we can’t see it, so we don’t have to worry about it. On sites like myspace, those heretofore private behaviors become public, even if on a fairly tame level. If these parents are troubled by their children posting pictures of themselves in tight pants with thongs peeking out, they’d be even more troubled to learn what their children do over IM, or when they call their long-distance boyfriends. But to drive them away from those behaviors, protected as they are by digital distance, is to drive them directly into similar and perhaps more hazardous behaviors in ‘the real world.’ Why? Because in the rigid contexts of the ‘real world’, the constructs that support and detract from these behaviors are much harder and less forgiving.

In the collapsed contexts of the online world, people are finding that they can experiment with the actual paradigms they live by, manipulate them, test them, explore them in a way that doesn’t have immediate physical or social impact, and as a result are developing new moral ideas to cope with our rapid change from local self to global self.

But in our expressions of self – as we become more honest and open online, as we move toward our global selves, our need for the private self increases. As the Bush administration continues to push its agenda of fear and division, I hear the argument all too often that people who want privacy must be doing something wrong.

But “wrong” in a world of collapsing contexts and colliding moral codes is not the same as "Wrong " with a capital W. Our understanding of right and wrong is rapidly changing as we become more and more exposed to social contexts that we’d previously ignored or denied. And as the digital world becomes more entwined with the digital world – until we have virtually no distinction between the two – the communities that clash as a result will spar over these changing concepts in very real and possibly dangerous ways. How many honestly believe that news shows talking about teenagers posting racy pictures on MySpace actually discouraged — instead of encouraged pedophiles from looking around? And in terms of what WAS recommended, other than the futile moral outrage from people who think that teenagers can actually DENY their sexuality, privacy was most important: keeping distance between our digital self and physical self.

But we can’t stop these worlds from colliding. They already are, and as we become exposed to the ‘super public’, an ever growing ‘local’ community of people, it will become more and more difficult to ignore the voices that disagree. What happens then? History says there are two major eventualities: growth, and violence.

Often the violence comes first. Those who have the ability to lord their moral codes over others use force and violence to attempt to squash conflicting ideas. Sometimes that force is simply through the use of fear and threats; sometimes through physical harm.

Is it any wonder that – even as our identities become more open and more available to a greater audience, we simultaneously have a greater need to choose what we keep private and what we do not?

It isn’t about committing crimes, or just keeping my bank account information safe; privacy is as much about defining the boundaries of my Self as is openness. Only the two working together produce a healthy definition of self; and in a world where the contexts supporting so much of the ideas we think of as intrinsic to ourselves are collapsing, we’d do well to carefully consider what we wish to share, who we wish to be, and how we wish to deal with what’s coming…

A world where it’ll be impossible to ignore that the lines we’ve used to separate ourselves from others are being erased and where defining self truly becomes an individual process.