I’m trying to catch up on the notable talks of LeWeb — so far I haven’t seen anything revolutionary come out of it, but a few interesting things, so it’s hard to figure out what to watch (especially since my attention span for online video is absolutely terrible; I prefer transcripts 90% of the time). Still, this talk caught my eye as danah’s work is pretty awesome. It’s definitely worth a watch (and it has a transcript/crib, yay!).
There were two main themes as I understand it; firstly the concept that we all see the Internet differently, and secondly the question of whether we are looking or not. The former is something that’s fascinated me for a while. Being able to see someone else’s world through their eyes — through unedited honest life-stream social media updates, through their Facebook photos, etc — can verge on gratuitous voyeurism. It’s taking the idea of a reality celeb to a new level, in a way. Internet superstars don’t have to be A-list or royalty, they can just be the sort of people whose wry observations about daily life (be it a blog, YouTube channel or even Twitter stream) are entertaining and a form of escapism.
As well as e-stalking interesting people, the more useful (and far more voyeuristic) side of this is e-stalking people I vaguely know. Catching up on old friends’ or past acquaintances’ lives via their LinkedIn, Facebook photos, etc; it somehow seems all right to live vicariously through people if you’ve actually met them. Kinda.
The second theme is about the ugly stuff. There’s a lot of nasty things that happen in this world and increasingly, victims are talking about them online. Bullying isn’t more prevalent now than it used to be, but it is more visible, and the problem is that people assume that there’s an automatic equation between stuff being online and stuff being seen. As anyone who’s ever written a blog knows, you can often be writing for an audience of one, and even if you have a hundred Myspace friends, there’s no guarantee anyone’s listening. Or that their reports to the authorities of your accounts of mistreatment at home will ever get taken seriously.
It’s sort of a cross between Neighbourhood Watch and “eyes on the street“. We need to look out for the disturbing stuff, violence, crime, etc., and use that constructively to help people, to open up conversations rather than jump to conclusions. Because appearance is everything, and someone posting about drug use or self-harm on their Livejournal might be doing it to fit in, not as a cry for help. It’s so hard to find where the boundaries are between the projected image you want to create online, and the real self underneath. The move towards real-time stream-of-consciousness updating kind of helps, but even a simple tweet such as “Help me” needs to be taken in context.