Nina’s post about privacy on Facebook thoroughly covered the issue.
But Facebook’s habit of thumbing their nose at privacy concerns provoked a couple of interesting posts on Crooked Timber as well.
Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg, founder and owner of Facebook, is quoted in a forthcoming book making some dismissive remarks about privacy concerns:
“You have one identity,” he emphasized three times in a single interview with David Kirkpatrick in his book, “The Facebook Effect.” “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” He adds: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”
As Henry at Crooked Timber points out:
Facebook appears to be deliberately and systematically making it harder and harder for people to vary their self-presentations according to audience. I think that this broad tendency (if it continues and spreads) impoverishes public life.
Kirkpatrick explains what is wrong with this:
Individuals are constantly managing and restricting flows of information based on the context they are in, switching between identities and persona. I present myself differently when I’m lecturing in the classroom compared to when I’m have a beer with friends. I might present a slightly different identity when I’m at a church meeting compared to when I’m at a football game. This is how we navigate the multiple and increasingly complex spheres of our lives.
And Kieren Healy argues that having integrity is not about having a consistent self-presentation:
Having an identity and having a secret are in fact quite closely related, and not just for superheroes. Here’s a piece from the Times from the pre-FB era that makes the point:
“In a very deep sense, you don’t have a self unless you have a secret, and we all have moments throughout our lives when we feel we’re losing ourselves in our social group, or work or marriage, and it feels good to grab for a secret, or some subterfuge, to reassert our identity as somebody apart,” said Dr. Daniel M. Wegner, a professor of psychology at Harvard. … Psychologists have long considered the ability to keep secrets as central to healthy development. Children as young as 6 or 7 learn to stay quiet about their mother’s birthday present. In adolescence and adulthood, a fluency with small social lies is associated with good mental health. … The urge to act out an entirely different persona is widely shared across cultures as well, social scientists say, and may be motivated by curiosity, mischief or earnest soul-searching. Certainly, it is a familiar tug in the breast of almost anyone who has stepped out of his or her daily life for a time, whether for vacation, for business or to live in another country. “It used to be you’d go away for the summer and be someone else, go away to camp and be someone else, or maybe to Europe and be someone else” in a spirit of healthy experimentation, said Dr. Sherry Turkle, a sociologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Now, she said, people regularly assume several aliases on the Internet, without ever leaving their armchair …”
This idea that it is dishonest or insincere to withhold information about oneself is fundamentally mistaken. Social life isn’t enhanced by brutal honesty and integrity is not about having a single self-presentation.
Integrity is a matter of consistently acting on the basis of one’s system of values and sustaining the value of the variety of things we care about. Not only is that consistent with having different self-presentations in different contexts—integrity requires a variety of self-presentations.
If I value my students and their education some facets of my private life will be irrelevant or inimical to their development. And if I value my family relationships, my self-presentation as a teacher must at times be suppressed.
But Zuckerberg does provide us with an example of the lack of integrity. As one commentator on Crooked Timber puts it:
Hey, you know what really is a lack of integrity is trying to conceal very obvious monetary motives behind a veneer of moralizing. How much more honest would it be if Zuckerberg just came out and said, yeah, we don’t give a damn about your privacy, this is how we’re going to make money. Then we could all know where we stand. The worst aspect of all of this is the pretense that anyone on Facebook’s corporate end cares about this and their projection of their own moral deficiencies onto people with legitimate privacy concerns. Not that I’m, like, surprised or anything.
It is easy for a straight, privileged man like Zuckerbeg to extol the virtues of a single identity while hiding behind his body guards and wealth. Women and anyone from marginalized social groups cannot afford to be so sanguine about privacy. But of course straight, privileged men tend to think they are the only people who matter.
