Seen "Liar, liar" or "What women want"? No matter how transparent we think we are, our thoughts are always a lot deeper than what we say, or write. And in a way, I think that's a very good thing. If we all always said/wrote exactly everything we thought, I believe the world would become a mess.

How about putting your bank account details on your blog?

I thin the "Black Inner Circle" may become smaller for some people.. but it will always be there.

http://karmaweb.wordpress.com/2006/09/22/privacy-and-social-networks/

Also are you familiar with semi serious, Norlin's maxim -

"The internet inexorably pulls information from the private domain into the public domain."

Check out the original post here

http://blogs.zdnet.com/digitalID/?p=60

But it's about your sexual preferences, fobbies, fears, regrets and stuff that you don't like to talk about normally.

@Harshal: thanks for being so harsh - your parents seem to have found a good name for you. ;)

Some of this is generational (I'm in my 40s), but that's a simplistic excuse. Some of this is also because these people are busy with their lives. And, some of it is simply personal preference. They don't WANT to share a lot of personal details publicly.

We take many cues on social media from youth and, while that's interesting, I see little discussion about the ways in which youth behavior is different from adult behavior (exploration of identity, etc). The changes in behavior from youth to young adulthood (20s) to the 30s and beyond is an interesting one... how will it affect social technologies? They won't simply drop them.. but to pretend that they will simply carry them forward, behaving the same way at 35 as they do at 15 is naive. It will bear watching I think.

I find the whole moral basis of our society is changing, but the majority of people haven't realised this yet...

One thing I'd caution against is extrapolating from what enthusiasts for a particular thing do to how we will all live. Saying a service has 5 million users seems impressive - until we remember that there are hundreds of millions online and billions to follow. Twitter, Jaiku and the like might become very big in numbers... yet remain tiny in adoption percentage. That's fine - not everyone has to love something for it to be useful, interesting and worthwhile

I wrote about this some time ago. My thesis is that corporations and the government know more about us and have more information about us than we do as individuals or that people that we care about and consider friends or family have about us. I can't exactly say what the net effect of this is, but, as you suggested in terms of knowledge having power, I think it's the ability to restrict one's access to data about them that becomes powerful... and that's why I'm something of an advocate for personal attention data repositories.

Think about it this way: the more raw information that individuals have about themselves, the greater the need for better tools to help make sense of that data will be. I look at services like Wesabe springing up from a need to understand one's personal banking records, which, to date, are a mess of hieroglyphics and bank codes. For some reason banks don't really work hard at making personal financial trends easy to understand or to inform us in making better decisions... And despite tools like Quicken and Microsoft Money, we're still stuck dealing with proprietary formats that lock up vital information about ourselves that companies have access to but that we don't.

So, this whole notion of privacy that many people get up in arms over is actually a mirage of control -- the only privacy you have is from your neighbors and family and friends. And, in most cases, don't you want them to know you better than the government? Or big companies? And that's why blogging and similar publishing means are really powerful and valuable: they put this information that was once very hard to disseminate into the hands of friends.

Say what you will about who also gets access to that data, but I think having a publicity policy is a lot wiser than a privacy policy; Kathy Sierra did get a lot of support and attention because of how much perceived privacy she's given up... and as such, when some miscreants decided to invade what little space she'd carved out for herself and her family, an army of people took up her defense, much moreso than would have if she's clung to this idea of privacy and anonymity.

Anyway, the choice to be pubic and accessible is a personal one, but it should be made not out of some sense of "being private" but rather, in the sense of proactively sharing information with people that you want to know you better.

That cornerstone of feminist theory is also key to internet theory and open source theory I think. When we chose to 'proactively share information with people we want to know better' as Chris puts it so awesomely, we contribute more to the commons and communicate that we want to know others better by putting more of ourselves up for debate. It's generous, and can be beneficial.

Which isn't to say it's easy or comes naturally. I find it hard to live publicly sometimes for fear of saying too much. But I'm getting over it. =) And I think projects like openID and mybloglog extend the potential in our increasing comfort with our public selves in mind blowing ways.

However, all these online tools you've mentioned are about critical mass. That's what makes them popular and successful.

What you won't get is a critical mass for the black circle. Just lots of lurking in the shadows of online land, the same way it happens in real life.

where I talk not just about privacy but online versus offline, always on versus sometimes off and AWAY from the public eye.

When you are always on, always out, whether its online or offline, there is no time for re-charging or creation. One of my favorite books: The Power of Full Engagement refers to it as Recovery Time.

In Gelb's How To Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci, he poses the question: where are you when you get your best ideas?

The answer is not inside a news aggregator, Twitter, flickr or a social networking site. The answers are "in the shower," "resting in bed," "walking in nature," and "listening to music." In other words, inside your private self, your privateYOU not your openYOU.

The latter is slipping further and further away and many of us are starting to wonder how far people are prepared to go in the public eye. I also wonder what it is that they really want on the other side.

Renee