Social Matter

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, said in an interview quote that

“You have one identity. 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… having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

The animating method behind Facebook and other social networks is to move private communication into public, machine-readable formats. The philosophy behind it is that people should behave in private as they do in public, as a matter of integrity.

What that means for most people is that their private weaknesses and failures become available for general scrutiny and criticism. The beliefs that a person holds that would have been kept personal, secret, and protected in an earlier era are now held up for general review. Your private correspondence becomes revealed (at least in a pseudo-anonymized machine format) to the marginal, usually wildly-overstated benefit of advertisers.

People and their activity also become automatically archived and searchable, with access to a given person’s activity history just a friend or application request away.

In older times, private life, at least for the middle class family and above, was more sovereign. The man and his wife had public personalities guided by etiquette, profession, religion, and culture. A respectable public face presented dignity, self-control, and some measure of discipline. Dress was more formal, even within the home, and even though the public face was an artificial persona, it was a persona that served a social purpose.

In the Facebook age, instead of holding up an identity that is acknowledged to be artificial, people instead create personas that have the pretense of being authentic. Taking queues from lifestyle advertising, the most ‘successful’ promoters portray themselves as if they were characters in an ad or TV show.

Ad agencies have even picked up on this, by having their creative directors generate studiously down-scaled ads that are composed by professionals, but look as if they could have been taken by amateurs.

Privacy facilitates social harmony

The key value of privacy, which tends to be lost amid all the technological babble about the concept, is that it makes social cooperation more feasible among people who disagree, share different tastes, or fundamental points of view.

The irony of this is that some of the people who are most in favor of destroying privacy are also the most in favor of encouraging ethnic and religious diversity, at least on the face of their rhetoric. These two goals bump into one another as countervailing forces.

Permitting the people to hold up a screen over their private life is what also makes it possible for them to cooperate effectively with people in the public sphere. To be studiously ignorant about the private beliefs and peccadillos of co-workers and others makes it possible to avoid more conflicts with them. Where there is real diversity — the kind that causes discomfort — there must be strong privacy, also. The greater the difference that must be maintained between public and private lives, the more substantial the discomfort that must be felt.

This is especially an issue with democracy. The reason why the United States has anonymous voting laws is because without them, people are persecuted for their party affiliations by people with rival party loyalties. This being forgotten, the age of Facebook and similar technologies has opened up ordinary people to this sort of ordinary political persecution. Moderating influences like that of the respect for privacy put a brake on some of the more rapacious, violent aspects of party politics.

In democracy, the opinions of other people can be actively dangerous to you, your income, and your way of life. This infects people with a missionary zeal to muddle with the beliefs of others and to encourage them to promote certain political beliefs at the expense of others. Individuality, eccentricity, and other expressions of difference become dangerous rather than tolerable.

The impulse for this comes less from the availability of the technology, and more because of the preexisting social trends. When there is a family life, there is communication and closeness within the family.

With more people living without a family life, they go to the public square to get their needs for social validation met. This doesn’t work so well, because strangers have no skin in the life of the atomized individual that only exists as an image on their screens.