No one makes money off of creating private communities in an era of "free".

Power is critical in thinking through these issues. The privileged folks don't have to worry so much about people who hold power over them observing them online. That's the very definition of privilege. But most everyone else does. And forcing people into the public eye doesn't dismantle the structures of privilege, the structures of power. What pisses me off is that it reinforces them. The privileged get more privileged, gaining from being exposed. And those struggling to keep their lives together are forced to create walls that are constantly torn down around them. The teacher, the abused woman, the poor kid living in the ghetto and trying to get out. How do we take them into consideration when we build systems that expose people?

Don't get me wrong - folks have the right to enter the public stage. As long as we realize that this ain't always pretty. I will never forget the teen girl who thought that her only chance out was to put up mostly naked photos online in the hopes that some talent agency would find her. All I could think of was the pimp who would.

[My note - is that an argument that social networks are not level playing fields but have huge inbuilt hierarchies I see before me? I can't wait for danah to get cracking on the fluffier views out there on social capital aka whuffie And, did anyone notice that Mr Zuckerberg was caught out during the recent great unveiling of everyone's data on Facebook but then scurried to make his things private again. Neither was Mr Schmidt happy when people at CNET used his own Google service to find out things about him. Watch not what they say, but what they do....]

It's in Facebook's economic interest to force people into being public, even if a few people break up with Facebook in the process. Of course, it's in Facebook's interest to maintain some semblance of trust, some appearance of being a trustworthy enterprise. I mean, if they were total bastards, they would've just turned everyone's content public automatically without asking. Instead, they asked in a way that no one would ever figure out what's going on and voila, lots of folks are producing content that is more public than they even realize. Maybe then they'll get used to it and accept it, right? Worked with the newsfeed, right? Of course, some legal folks got in the way and now they can't be that forceful about making people public but, guess what, I can see a lot of people's content out there who I'm pretty certain don't think that I can.

........

There isn't some radical shift in norms taking place. What's changing is the opportunity to be public and the potential gain from doing so. Reality TV anyone? People are willing to put themselves out there when they can gain from it. But this doesn't mean that everyone suddenly wants to be always in public. And it doesn't mean that folks who live their lives in public don't value privacy. The best way to maintain privacy as a public figure is to give folks the impression that everything about you is in public.

If we're building a public stage, we need to give people the ability to protect themselves, the ability to face the consequences honestly. We cannot hide behind rhetoric of how everyone is public just because everyone we know in our privileged circles is walking confidently into the public sphere and assuming no risk. And we can't justify our decisions as being simply about changing norms when the economic incentives are all around. I'm with Marshall on this one: Facebook's decision is an economic one, not a social norms one. And that scares the bejesus out of me.