One of the great things about my current job is it gives me the cause to go and have conversations with people that I probably wouldn’t otherwise get to meet. A couple of weeks ago I took a trip up to Oxford to meet Baroness Susan Greenfield, an academic who specialises in the physiology of the brain. Her work has led her to come to some (somewhat controversial) conclusions about the impact that the world of computing, and particularly of social networking and gaming, are having on the way in which we think.
During our conversation it struck me that I am probably one of the oldest Digital Natives, to use Marc Prensky’s terminology. When I was growing up I was lucky to be exposed not only to computers from a fairly early age, but also the world of digital communities in their early days in the 1980s. Those bulletin board systems (BBSs) were early social networks: it has never really felt strange to me to converse with folk online because I’ve been doing for as long as I’ve been typing, more or less.
However, as Susan observed, I’ve been also lucky to grow up and older in the period in which all of this social technology has itself emerged; it’s given me (I hope) a reasonably good ability to make distinctions between my public and private personae, and also between my personal and professional personae. The risk that Greenfield sees for generations emerging when social networking has become pervasive is that making those distinctions is becoming harder and harder, and that without the ability to have a clear private dialogue with oneself, a person’s identity runs the risk of becoming extremely fragile. Inside we are scared, we are lonely, we are unsure, we have insecurities; if we don’t have the understanding that having those private thoughts is perfectly valid, and that they don’t all have to be expressed in tweets or timelines, then our ability to make sense of the world around us becomes much diminished.
The concept of “privacy” is one that I struggle with to some extent; I’m a fairly open person, and, for example, have always found work colleagues who never disclose anything about their life outside the office as slightly, well, creepy. I remember be astonished a year or so into my working life when, faced with a friend who was dying of cancer, to be congratulated by a colleague when I revealed that my thoughts might be elsewhere as a result. The conversation in Oxford, though, as made me realised that I do have plenty that I keep to myself even if my online activity might suggest otherwise…
mmitII 