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February 20, 2003

Expectations meltdown

Fascinating on many levels: Accidental Privacy Spills: James Grimmelmann dissects at length the story of what happened when a reporter sent some interesting but very informal conference notes to a few friends.

Remember how everyone keeps saying that distance is irrelevant on the Internet? Well, this is what happens when distance disappears. You wind up right next to the damndest people. The problem isn't that you can hear your loud neighbors; the problem is that they can hear you.
I have two issues with the analysis: [1] there's a conflation of Internet and Web; and [2] I don't believe there's a "complete dissolution of the category of the 'private'".
Of course everything is "just bits", copy-and-pasteable to some extent, but we can build environments like your Inbox in which "private" is virtually indistinguishable from "public", and also tools like Groove in which the private sphere reigns by default. Thus also my fascination with Groove-Web interop, in which the technology to blur that boundary proves quite easily tractable, but hints to support and reinforce the appropriate social norms need to be present too.