Who Needs to Know?

My daughter informs me that the urge to share is probably a generational thing. My generation - those who have been around for 5 or 6 decades - are reticent about sharing personal data with friends and strangers in these wild west un-sherrifed cyberspace locales commonly referred to as social networking sites. While not universal, this is mostly true.

My daughter's generation - those who identify with the "thirty-something" generation - feel at ease with modern social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter (I call it electronic graffiti). They tell us their thoughts and feelings, post photos of the kids or the new tattoo, talk about upcoming vacations, chat in public, boasting, complaining and boring. They don't worry that sometimes a glitch will expose all their info to everyone. And that info - once posted to the Internet - is like, forever dude. They seem to have no trouble accepting the fact that a total stranger can pay $30 and learn pretty much everything about you from financial records to legal actions. If you have nothing to hide, what's your problem?

IMHO, The problem with her generation is a sort of smug arrogance - perhaps based on an irrational faith in the goodness of others, or maybe because of a dependent sense that the nanny state will keep them secure... and you are just an old fart who is afraid of the unknown. But, consider how ineffective governments are at protecting citizens...think about the fear of seniors and others who live in dangerous areas of our cities (while our troops are policing other countries), everywhere you look people are being robbed - by crooks and by banks and credit card companies, and on and on. The thieves and polluters and drug lords are allowed to move freely among us.

The generation of Facebook users kids who are in school today haven't a clue that someday they may regret posting their innermost thoughts and opinions. The kid that posts "Obama is a doushe" on his profile at age 17 may be blissfully unaware that this data could be available to background checkers when he applies for that secure government job in a few years. The checkers might not think that miss-spelling is the worst part of that statement.

Such a mistake can follow a person forever. Poor Zuckerman, (Founder of Facebook) has his own privacy problems. At age 19 he sent an instant message to a friend boasting how he had the personal data about 4,000 friends at Harvard. When the friend asked how he got the data he answered, "They trusted me. Dumb f*cks."

I guess I agree with the generational differences about sharing - in that we tend to become more cynical as we get older and experience the unpredictable things that our fellow human beings are capable of. Some people call that wisdom.

Mark Twain said it: “It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.” (I'm sure he never dreamed that we would be reading his private letters a hundred and ten years later.)

One of my octogenarian friends tells me that in his day nobody would would talk about it if they had come into any money. For example if he won a bet or hit the number, he would not tell his friends for fear that they would expect him to buy the drinks.

So what are we afraid of? Well, just for example: ID thieves are always looking for info about you that could reveal your password. Most people's passwords are the names of their kids, or pets, or some easily decipherable keystrokes. One recent study found that approximately 3.4 million U.S. adults were victims of stalking in a given 12 month period. 75% of stalkers are not strangers to their victims.

Today in the WSJ I found evidence that I am not alone in wondering who really needs to know what I am thinking. Several new sites have popped up aimed at FB users in an effort to warn them to be aware of the privacy issues. One fed-up group has organized their own planned demonstration by encouraging others to quit en masse on May 31, to send a final message to Mr. Zuckerman I guess. Sounds like he really needs to know what people of all generations are thinking.

Facts Are Stubborn Things

If you do an Internet search on the phrase "Facts are stubborn things" you will find that the cyberworld is full of conflicting information. You get about 60,000 hits. Within the first dozen citations, the quote is attributed to John Adams, Mark Twain, Ronald Regan, Lawrence Peters, and several unknown French guys. So much for stubborn facts, eh?

This, in a nutshell, is the problem for seekers of Truth ever since Al Gore invented the Internets. There is too much conflicting data, misinformation and outright malicious fabrication. As Lincoln observed, "It is easy to fool most of the people most of the time. "

Guys like Rush Limbaugh and John Stewart make their living maliciously distorting the words and deeds of anyone of the other side of their political ideology. They may think they are doing it for entertainment, but too many of their fans miss the humor and believe anything they hear from the lips of their guru.

We do not know who we can trust to tell the truth. The stubborn facts are buried deep in the mine and we do not have time to go in and dig them out ourselves. Google and other search engines are constantly gamed by special interests and clever marketers to make their interest-friendly results appear near the top of the list of returned hits.

Like me, most seekers-of-truth are in a hurry for enlightenment. So, we usually abandon our online research after viewing a few pages of search results. We click on the one or two that seem to agree with our preconceived notions. If the writing is intelligible, and it supports our point-of-view, we hyper-link it to verify our source. We shamelessly ignore contradictory data.

The problem remains:

“Facts are ventriloquists dummies. Sitting on a wise man's knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.” Aldous Huxley. At least, I think he was the one who said it.