Baxter & Brainwaith 23 and Boyd & Hargiatti

When Facebook first made profiles public, I remember that I saw the default option was to go along with it and that I deliberately changed it.  I didn't like the idea of being found by just whoever under my real name - I'd hung out in a lot of other locales where just about anyone could see my profile, but those profiles were anonymous, not connected to the real me outside giving out my first name and general location.  (I challenge you to track me down with the keywords 'Hanna' and 'Pacific Northwest'.)  I have never put my phone number on Facebook, or my address.  Since then, I hadn't thought much about what other users were seeing, but what companies and apps were seeing was definitely on my mind, at least for the last year or so.  After reading Boyd & Hargiatti, I was compelled to go on Facebook and check my settings out to see how secure they were.  The process of privatizing my information was just as complex as Boyd, Hargiatti, and Nancy Baym complained, and I was surprised to see that somehow much of my info had ended up accessible to 'friends of friends' instead of just 'friends,' which was what I thought I'd initially specified.  I was also surprised to see my email listed as accessible to friends.  The only things 'public' were my likes (in music, TV, etc.)  It took a little less than an hour to make sure that all of this information (likes, profile, etc.) was accessible only to friends, listing my email as accessible only to myself (I have no idea what the point of this feature is, but it worked for me removing it from others' view since I couldn't figure out how to delete it entirely), and cleaning up my friends list to only people whose names I could actually recognize at first glance (something I'd been meaning to do for a while, although there were not many people in this category since it has been years since I friended anyone who asked and was associated with my high school).  Finally, I confronted apps.  In high school, I used Facebook to kill time a lot more than I do now, leaving me with about 140 mostly unused applications that could access my information.  Much to my relief, I found a button allowing me to 'delete all apps' instantaneously, and did so.  This was when I was greeted with a surprise: a message asking if I wanted to opt out entirely of apps having access to my info.  I quickly did so, but what surprised me about it was that the message also assured me that, even if I opted out of giving apps my data, I could actually continue to use them, if I was okay with the fact that games, etc. couldn't remember me or save my information.  What struck me about this is that previous to then, any time I clicked a new app, I was completely unable to proceed to it until I had given it access to all of my private information.  So yes, Facebook has the resources to make one's profile pretty completely private... but why is it that I had to find out about how from a source that was not Facebook and take an entire hour to do it?  And why do I still not feel like my information is completely secure... and since I don't, why don't I just delete my Facebook?

The short answer is "because my sister asked me not to."  And now that I've gone over my settings with a fine-tooth comb, the idea of staying on doesn't bug me.  But the idea of her staying on without having done so bothers me a lot... she is a constant Facebooker, who recently told me she takes pride in the fact that the last several posts on my wall are from her.  I know she uses the site intelligently, more or less... she doesn't put anything on Facebook that she doesn't want her peers as a general group to see, and when she has more private information to convey, she chooses a different channel (email, Skype, phone) to convey it.  On the blog she is sharing with her best friend to tell stories of their adventures in London with others, she is even more careful.  The blog is meant for their mutual friends, myself included, but it's accessible to anyone with a Blogger account.  Despite claims that youth don't care about privacy, the Boyd & Hargiatti study shows they do, and I think that's true.  But it's easy to assume, when you're told, that just pressing a button to change your privacy settings to 'custom' takes care of it.  You've changed something that is related to your privacy that does, in fact, make your profile more private... but it might not do everything you want or expect it to, and it might give you a false sense of security.  Which is worrisome.  Information disclosure as described in Baxter & Brainwaithe is a pretty deliberate thing, especially in sensitive matters.  You don't tell everything to everyone, and the act of telling is very deliberate... one chooses how to tell secrets, and to whom, very carefully.  You don't want people to overhear, and depending on your skill with and understanding of technology, people well may when you're disclosing information on Facebook.  Sure, you can use Facebook carefully, and many people do, but some users are ignorant.  And when it takes me at least an hour to fix my privacy settings and I'm one of the people who thinks about this, and has been thinking about this for at least a couple years, it is not those users' fault.

"Who Am We" by Sherry Turkle and "Identity Warranting" by Walther and Parks

Being asked to look at the profile or homepage of someone I know, and seeing how close or far it was from reality, the first person I thought of was my sister.  First of all, I know her possibly better than I know anyone else, so I can most easily identify the difference between her online persona and how she behaves when she's with me face-to-face.  Second of all, she's a pretty big Facebook user - she's the one who asked me not to delete my Facebook profile when I was considering quitting the site.  When I look online at her profile, (connected to a real-life identity that can be corroborated and 'warranted' by social structures of people we both know in person), the person I see seems 'real' to me just as she does in person.  There's pictures of her smiling, the occasional bit of dry wit and sarcasm, posts from her friends and our mutual friends, and an overall cheerful tone very reminiscent of the public persona that she projects.  Her interests and political values are listed, and only her real family members are listed as family.  What is lacking is what I know she doesn't project publicly - parts of herself, personality characteristics, that only come out when she's talking with just people she's very close to, whom she trusts.  My sister on Facebook is an idealized version of my sister face-to-face, but it's not that far off.  Comparing her profile-'irl' differences to those of someone I know less well, it's hard to see, to some extent, which version is more real, because I don't know the 'real' them.

Identities are complex, offline or online, but online, that complexity becomes much more salient.  Turkle's description of 'windows', where we appear as different people in different mediums, makes sense to me, although I haven't usually presented massively differently across mediums.  The exception to this rule has been my experience in play-by-post roleplaying, which is precisely why her description of MUD players was fascinating to me.  The idea of playing the role of a woman sometimes, a man sometimes, and a magical rabbit at others is nothing new to me - I've done something akin to that myself.  What's completely new to me is the idea that any of these should be connected to each other in any way, or more importantly, to the person who spawned them.  A cursory look at the document on my computer listing the full names, ages, and other descriptive information of my original characters reveals 57 names - many of them inactive (I haven't written or played with them in a while), some of them not.  But this world is radically different from that of MUDs.  The online roleplaying I have done is a game, a story.  The online roleplaying of MUD players was explicitly connected to their lives, no matter how far fetched their personas.  Being someone who just plays for fun, this is what throws me - why make the connection?

As time has passed, it seems, MUDs have lost popularity, and when you play an obviously fantastical role in an obviously fantastical situation online, that role separates itself from yourself 'irl'.  Most people online present as themselves, certainly in the most popular online mediums (twitter, Facebook, tumblr, YouTube, etc.).  Even Joel from 'Alone Together', when he presents as a little pink elephant in Second Life, imbues Rashi with his own personality and makes it clear that he takes his Second Life relationships seriously, allowing him to use this fantastical persona to work through his real conflicts.  In "Who am I," Turkle says that "... some are tempted to think of life in cyberspace as insignificant, as escape or meaningless diversion. It is not. Our experiences there are serious play. We belittle them at our risk."  On this, I agree, and I think this may have been what made MUDs as fragmented and confusing as they seem to have been for many.  Fantasy can be mean of two things: either it's perceived as play, existing just for fun, or as a way to fulfill genuine desires, hopes, and deviances of the player in a safe space.  When many people play together in a fantasy without defining for which purpose they have come, it's harder to form a community, or to use online worlds to work through whatever you are trying to work through, because without knowing how seriously your partners/co-players take the fantasy, it's more difficult to know whether they can be trusted.