I know about this, a little. My wonderful mum (71) is one of the disenfranchised.  She has had potential access to the Internet for years, but she doesn’t use it for banking, shopping, entertainment, information, communication or news. Largely, she uses it because other people (me and my sister) want her to. I recall her telling me last year:

I go on the Internet once a week, just so I can remember how to do it. But once I’m there, I’ve no idea what I might want to do.

When it comes to the ‘fear factor’, she’s definitely worried about what it might do to her phone bill*. It took her 10 years to use an ATM, so I can’t see Internet banking on the cards in the near future. But more pertinently, she hasn’t really seen the point. She gets online; gets to MSN or whatever it is and there’s nothing there for her. I get that.

More recently, she’s joined a local library programme to learn more about computers and the Internet. She’s actually a lot happier about using their computers than the one she’s got at home: she can’t break anything and she can’t run-up a massive phone bill. The lessons have been a bit disappointing, though: apparently, copy-and-paste has been on the agenda three weeks running, without any indication why anyone would want to copy and paste anything. No one did that before, you see.

She sends me an email once a week on Wednesdays at 10am. I love that and always reply immediately, but by that point her allotted hour is finished.

And I’m sorry, but I do wonder what’s the point?

No shiny media campaign will make people like mum love the Web. Oh, I know there’s a gazillion silver surfers and online communities for the elderly and bingo and everything. But she’s happier with what she’s got and has always had. Our society is utterly selfish, self-serving and hateful to try to make her feel inadequate for not using the Web. Even more so when it makes it harder for her to access information and services because she doesn’t.

* she still says thing like ‘I know this is running up your bill, so I won’t be long’.

image credit: Ricky

The smallest group of people using social networks is the 18-24 age group, which rather confounds the idea that these sites are for young people. Across the board, only 9% of 18-24 year-olds are social network users, according to the research. Even on bebo, the ‘youthiest’, of the networks in the group, the mean age is 28. On facebook, which was originally conceived for college students, the average age is 38.

I have to throw in three cautions here:

1. It’s not clear what counts as being a ‘user’ of a social network. Having an account? More than 5 hours a month? More than 10? If the answer is ‘having an account’, then the mean age will naturally slip to the right as people try things out and then abandon them. Parents might well be expected to create accounts to see what it’s all about or to spy on their children.
2. More than half of teenagers lie about their age online, according to this story [http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/teens-lying-about-age-looks-and-lifes-online/story-0-1225746449526] and some qualitative research by danah boyd.
3. The 18-24 age band is [d’uh] only 6 years, as opposed to at least 9 years for the other age groups in the study. So there are 33% fewer people in the band – of course they’re going to represent lower numbers on social networks.

Notwithstanding, I don’t think this is enough to explain away the figures. Let’s face it: most social networks are more popular with older people than the young.

More surprises about what young people do and don’t do comes via the Guardian this morning. The following graph shows the percentage of people who have paid, or are willing to pay, for media products, by age:

Across every media type, teenagers claim that they are more willing to pay or have paid than people in their forties.

If you combine the two pieces of research together, you discover that most social networks appeal to a demographic that is significantly less likely to pay for anything than teenagers. More headaches for Mr Zuckerberg.

You’ll have seen this word flying about recently and it’s time for some explanations.

Err… don’t you mean ‘publically’? ['publicly' if you're American]

No. Well, in some ways, yes, I do. Let me explain.

In the past, there has been an assumption that privacy was the default state of human existence. It was only when you, someone or something else acted on that state that your privacy was broken. You did something ‘in public’, ‘went public’ or ‘published’. But if that was ever really the case – I’d argue that it’s partly a symptom of late C20th urban living – then it most certainly not true at this point in the early 21st Century. There’s a database entry just a few seconds after your birth that stays attached to you for the rest of your life. Everyone has got information on you – lots of it – from the government to the police to the supermarkets you use. And they’ll probably lose it or allow it to be stolen at some point.

Things get even worse when it comes to the Internet: your ISP is monitoring your data stream; Facebook is keeping your teenage indiscretions alive forever; Google is retaining your search history. Our brave new world of mobile applications sometimes seems particularly geared to recording (and judging!) your location to within a few yards using GPS.

So one part of the meaning of publicy is this status of not having privacy, for which historically we haven’t had a single word, so strong is the assumption that privacy is the natural state of affairs.

People aren’t entirely happy about this being the case, of course. And that draws in the second part of the meaning of the word. But first, some background…

We have strong personal, social, professional and political reasons for having an attachment to secrets and lies. While we’re told that we have nothing to fear from lack of privacy; unless we’ve done something wrong, in which case we deserve what we get. That’s not really true. In fact, it’s not true at all.

Secrets and Lies

Most religions and philosophies suggest that ‘telling the truth’ is a moral necessity. But this isn’t entirely the case. Secrets and lies are arguably essential to our psychological well-being. Certainly, they’re essential to everyone getting along without a fight every two seconds. By some accounts, we lie 200 times a day just to keep the peace.

Personal lies: ‘No, of course you’re not fat’; ‘No, it’s great that your mother is coming to stay’.

Social lies: ‘How am I feeling? Really good thanks’, ‘Oh yes, how is [child-name]? Do you have any more pictures?’

Professional lies: ‘great work, Bob’; ‘it’s been a pleasure doing business with you’; ‘we have the utmost respect for [competitor company]’.

Political lies: ‘We will cut taxes and maintain quality of public services’.

Secrets – probably best not to tell your mum that you take drugs, your wife that you fancy one of your colleagues; your boss that he stinks; your wartime allies that you think they are crass vulgarians. The place of secrets in our lives is more difficult to describe than the necessity of lying, but rather than dredge the literature right now, I think we’ll agree to agree (won’t we?) that we all have secrets and that their remaining secret is important to us.

The other difficulty is that this rise in public information has happened a lot more quickly that our society’s ability to come to terms with the consequences of that. We’re not especially good at forgiving and forgetting, for example, preferring instead to remember forever and condemn you for that one stupid thing you did five years ago.

So… Publicy?

Ah yes. The other part of the meaning of the word is very much akin to ‘publicity’. You see, there are two common tactics to coping with the loss of privacy:

Disinformation. Some 50% of teenagers post false information about themselves onto the Net. It’s been observed that if you look at the registration data, 10% of MySpace users are aged over 100, which seems rather unlikely, unless you factor in that you’re not supposed to register unless you’re 14 or over. [see the video below for more on this and other stats I cite]. Apparently, everyone lies on dating sites (men say they’re more successful; women that they’re younger and slimmer). If you counter the number of true facts about you that exist on record with a similar number of complete lies then the reliability of all the data is seriously compromised.

Curation. We make sure that the information that appears is, to the best of our ability, sanitised, presenting our ‘best side’. We untag drunken pictures of ourselves on Facebook; we don’t check in to FourSquare when we’re in McDonald’s and do when we’re in the Ritz; we remove ‘dodgy’ music from our Last.fm profiles. We use pseudonyms when we’re on networks that don’t reflect what we want to be part of our professional reputation. If someone or something is producing information about you, then you make sure to produce more, better quality information.

From the Economist’s report this week on Social Networks:

Research published last year by Pew showed that some 60% of adults are restricting access to their online profiles. In an earlier study the institute had found that, contrary to received opinion, many teenagers and young adults are also using privacy controls to restrict access to online information about them. Nicole Ellison, a professor at Michigan State University who studies social networks, says that over the past few years she has noticed that her students have become steadily more cautious about whom they share information with.

This corruption or correction of the information available about ourselves is the other side of the idea of ‘publicy’. Publicy isn’t the opposite or the death of privacy: it is the way we live when it is less available.

These ideas aren’t yours, are they?

No, ‘course not. To my knowledge, the word was coined by Laurent Haug, who founded the Lift conference among other achievements. Stowe Boyd wrote about this being the decade of publicy last month, with some great examples of the way different cultures accept certain pieces of information as ‘naturally to be disclosed’ or private. PR-man Brian Solis wrote about it last week, together with some fascinating data-points (taken from this study) about people’s attitudes to social networks that I’m still digesting. e.g.:

How do you pronounce it?

I don’t know: it’s that new. It’s either ‘publicky’ or [more likely] ‘publissy’. I quite like this ambiguity because it reinforces the dual meaning of ‘living in public’ and ‘generating publicity’. I also like that while it’s an utterly ugly word, this ugliness communicates its modernity rather well.

Anything else to say?

Maybe. Disinformation and curation both seem like coping mechanisms, both of which have drawbacks. Disinformation leaves a trail of lies and half-truths that might make a person seem like some sort of Walter Mitty fantasist when subjected to scrutiny. Curation requires time, judgement and skill – while it’s well-suited to a seasoned PR professional, it’s perhaps less so to those vulnerable people who will suffer most from complete disclosure.

Elements of society move at different speeds, as I’ve already remarked. Until we’re able to guarantee an internet Statute of Limitations on how long being an idiot lasts and under what circumstances it counts, then there will be a disconnect between the abilities of technology to record us and the abilities of the people we deal with to cope with that data. My belief is that it takes several decades – maybe two generations – for this sort of change. Until then, we’ll have to suck it down.

I don’t make any judgement on the fact that we now live publicy and not privately. That’s like railing against the incoming tide.

And this video?

It’s Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist working for Intel, talking about secrets and lies on the Internet at the 2008 Lift conference. I’ve cited it before, but it’s well worth a second look. Don’t forget to leave a comment, though.

Pew Research Center reports that older people are almost as likely to embrace technological change as young people:

…innovations in cell phones, email and online shopping are seen as changes for the better by most Americans with positive views reaching well beyond the youngest Millennial generation. These kinds of change are viewed at least as favorably by Americans in their 30s and 40s as they are by those in their late-teens and 20s and, in many cases, it is only those 65 and older who have less enthusiastic views of these innovations.

This is hopefully the beginning of the end for the remarkably widely rehearsed ‘digital natives vs. digital immigrants’ argument.

It’s not all good news for the digital evangelist, though. There’s a considerably more stark – and perhaps depressing – contrast in opinion when it comes to approval of some of the newer web innovations: blogs and social networks. Only a quarter or fewer over-50s see these things as a positive change.

Just 15% of over-65s think the arrival of blogs is a change for the better, compared to 44% of 18-29 year-olds.

However, this lukewarm response to web innovations is likely to be the result of a lack of familiarity rather than experience. In the UK, around 25% of over-50s and 70% of over-65s have never used the Internet (caveat: these are 2007 figures – I’d guess it’s less now, and perhaps less in the US than the UK, anyway). It’s hard to imagine those people giving a positive appraisal of blogs and socnets, when they’ve never read, written, used or been a part of one. Given their response to mobiles and email, they’re as likely to enjoy these things as anyone else, given the opportunity.

(via. Josie Fraser)
picture credit: Tiago Rïbeiro