Please vote for my session at South by Southwest; I’d be most honored if you do. Here’s the description:
In our current cultural obsession with privacy, we risk losing the benefits of publicness—of the connections the internet enables.
So, in a discussion, we will consider the value of publicness in our lives and communities, in transparent government, and in truly public companies. We will ask what privacy really means and examine its brief history (it was born out of fear of new technologies, especially the dastardly Kodak camera).
We will discuss the ethics of privacy and publicness that should inform our decisions in social and business interactions: what we reveal, what we keep private, and why.
We will look at different cultures’ views of privacy (how the Germans, who get naked in saunas and public parks, care deeply about the privacy of everything … except their private parts).
We will ask what Facebook, Foursquare, Google, Twitter, government, and companies should do about privacy.
We will claim ownership of the public sphere–what’s public is owned by us, the public.
And we will forge a bill of rights in cyberspace to protect the openness of the internet that is our tool of making publics.
Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do? and the upcoming Public Parts, will present his findings and views about publicness—and his own experience revealing his prostate cancer–and then lead a discussion with the entire room—Oprah-like—about the nature of privacy and why it worries us.
The format tells us to list five questions the session will answer. Mine:
What does privacy really mean?
What are the benefits of sharing (and oversharing)?
How can we achieve open government and business?
How can we protect the openness of the internet?
What’s wrong with Jeff Jarvis’ penis?
I don’t know where you heard this, but I’ve never seen anyone naked in a public park. Maybe at beaches, or anything with a remote connection to swimming, but not in parks. And no, topless doesn’t count as naked, not even for women
I think Jeff may be referring to the English Garden in Munich. I saw many a naked German there when I went on a tour.
“What does it mean to be lonely” (Thomas Dumm ) in cyberspace?
Does the openness of the internet represent a threat to the “loneliness of the long-tail blogger”? (Nicholas Carr) How can sustained collaboration between our public and private identities be achieved? Is open government and open business a matter of time, or a heroic struggle? When can I meet my German chatfriends on 3d cam?
In terms of how can we protect the openness of the internet, how do free news sites figure into the mix? This very topic happens to be part of the dissertation I’m working on right now. I’m concerned with news consumers’ attitudes about online access fees being applied to the information they get online. Part of what I’m doing is a survey (http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/newspapers) and the other part is talking to newspaper editors about this. Thus far, it seems many newspapers are hesitant to even have such fees mentioned on their Web sites.
Publicness v. Privacy voted up, glad you answered question #5 in that article, we were all wondering about that in particular…..
I am trying to vote for you at SXSW and to do that apparently I have to register but after four tries I am giving up. I think it is both strange and unwise that you have to go out and campaign for votes so that you can speak at SXSW. Doesn’t this limit the discussion to only the most popular. Is there no place for the radical and unpopular. I am not sure of the wisdom of this. If my students at NYU were allowed to vote for what each class lecture would be about, the curriculum might be comfortable but probably very narrow. There is often a lot more learning in discomfort than in comfort – at least in my experience.
[...] flipside is that public, not private, is the default setting. “Let’s get naked” says Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) because “in our current cultural obsession with privacy, we risk [...]