Digital Kingdoms

Internet Privacy is Overrated

by TomLaPille on May 6, 2011

I find that people are often skittish about sharing much of themselves on the Internet. Although I don’t feel that way, it isn’t an insane attitude. Being public on the Internet has downsides. Anyone who applies for a job or goes on a date these days is getting Internet searched. If anything you don’t like gets posted, Google and the Internet Archive will remember it forever.

I think my best piece of internet detritus relating to me is a forum thread entitled “Is Tom LaPille a dick?” That came from my previous Internet life when I wrote strategy articles about Magic: The Gathering. Google seems to think it’s very relevant, so it hangs out near the bottom of page one of my search results.

All in all, that’s pretty mild. Lots of Internet famous people have vociferous and public haters, seemingly in proportion to how successful they are. Perhaps more people will post obnoxious things about me soon.

I find that most writing about Internet privacy concerns itself with the potential downsides that come from being public. What happens when you start looking for upside instead?

I have always thought a lot about the things that I am posting about on this blog. I have not always been in contact with others who do the same. Now that I’m being public about it, though, some amazing things are happening. I’m discovering that I have several friends who think similarly to me, and those people are starting to talk to me more often about topics that interest me. Other friends that these topics made uncomfortable are talking to me less often. I’m having conversations on Twitter with people I’ve never met in person that are relevant to my interests. By being open about what I’m thinking about, I’ve attracted lots of experiences that I would not have known existed.

This is all pretty mild right now. What would happen if I started a blog about Japanese swordsmanship? About SCA fighting? Would writing a meta-blog about the process of making this blog attract more blogger friends?

I also wonder about the scope of the possible opportunities I will have as my readership grows. Three years from now, might I be able to couch-surf across the country, spending a few days at a time with new people who are interested in thoughtful personal growth.

Let’s take this to the extreme as a thought experiment. What would happen if you publicly broadcasted every detail of your every day on the Internet? There are probably parts of your life that you’re not thrilled about sharing for the world to see, but imagine if you did anyway. No doubt some people would not like what they saw, but there would be some who did. Everyone would be able to see a full picture of you before interacting with you at all, and that means that the success rate of new social interactions would probably be quite high. This would take an enormous amount of courage, but the potential gains may be sizable.

All in all, I’ve shared more of myself on the Internet in the past two weeks than I have in a few years. I’m quite pleased with the results, and I don’t plan on slowing down. I don’t expect to ever implement the bare-it-all plan, but who knows?

I have operated under the assumption that the universe responds to my thoughts by manifesting more of what I am thinking about. This effect seems to be an order of magnitude more powerful when I do the thinking in public. I look forward to seeing where this goes.

{ 0 comments }

Rule Your Digital Kingdom

by TomLaPille on May 1, 2011

Let’s define your digital kingdom as the collection of all ways to interact with you over the Internet while you aren’t physically there. Your Facebook profile, your Twitter account, and your MySpace account from eight years ago are all part of it, as is the Google results page for your name. Not all of these things are under your direct control, but they all reflect on you when someone goes looking.

Every time someone Googles you, looks at your Facebook profile, or reads your tweets, they will find your digital kingdom waiting for them. They will assume that everything they find when they go searching is mostly accurate. If it exists in a form that is implicitly controlled by you, like your Facebook account or your blog, they will assume that you have allowed it into your kingdom deliberately.

Most people I know have a digital kingdom that consists of a Facebook page, a Twitter account, and a Google results page for their name. Some of my more technologically-savvy friends also have a personal blog. More than that gets us into advanced rulership, which is something that I don’t have a lot of experience with.

There are two main ways to control your digital kingdom.

1. Put only things you want in your kingdom.

This is a fairly simple affair once you have decided the purpose of your digital kingdom. If your goal is to extend personal connections, tweet regularly about how cute your cats are and how much fun you’re having at karaoke. If your goal is to build an Internet marketing empire with a professional appearance, then leave your cat and your drunken singing offline and just tweet what you want people to see.

The majority of people I know don’t have a chosen purpose for their digital kingdoms. That’s fine, but I think you can do better. Once you have done so, be consistent.

2. Keep things you don’t want out of your kingdom.

You may have guessed by now that I value consistency of message among my brand expressions on the Internet. I am the most knowledgeable person about what I want my brand to be, just as you are for you. We should not allow others to disrupt that message.

The dangers of allowing other people to do so became apparent to me during my time on Facebook. Under the last Facebook design that I interacted with, the wall served as the nerve center for learning about a person. Every status update went there, and looking at someone’s wall history told you a lot about them. Abiding to the previous point, I curated the things that went on that wall carefully so that I projected the image I wanted to project.

The default Facebook security settings allowed people to post random things to my wall. Much of the time, the posts were relatively harmless, like “Here is this rap video!” from a college friend or a “Hey, I just thought of you randomly! How are you doing?” from someone I hadn’t talked to in years. Occasionally, it was something actively embarrassing, like “This article on the internet says that you suck. Isn’t that interesting?”

I don’t actively consume rap music videos, so a random post of one in my feed is misleading at best. The “long-lost friend” post doesn’t have much downside, but is noise that gets in the way of me getting anything across. Allowing someone to post something that I actively don’t want others to see is just foolish. Each time any of these kind of wall posts arrived, I deleted them, and sometimes defriended the offending poster if the offense was egregious enough.

Only about one in ten additions to my wall from other people survived this scrutiny. Therefore, turning off people’s ability to post to my wall saved both time spent reviewing posts and annoyance, not to mention giving me the security that my wall would look the way I wanted it to.

The positive results for my psychological well-being from turning off wall posting were about what I expected. Others’ response to that, however, surprised me. Rather than post something to my wall, those people would now send me a private message, usually indignantly describing how they were forced to do this because I had disabled wall posting, and then they would share something that I was actively glad was not now on my wall. Apparently, someone told these people that they had the divine right to dump graffiti all over the wall I was trying to curate, and they were furious that I would get in the way. However, these messages just convinced me more and more that I had done the right thing.

The wall decision helped, but it didn’t stop my Facebook woes. People still occasionally felt the need to post sarcastic, obnoxious, or demeaning comments as responses to my own wall posts. I continued to delete these and sometimes defriend offenders, but this chafed on me over time. In the end, I deactivated my Facebook account rather than continue to put up with this. It was an unruly fiefdom, one designed by someone else to be difficult to rule over. Keeping a level of control that I was comfortable with over it took an unacceptable amount of time. Spending zero time on it made much more sense.

Similar considerations caused me to disable comments on this blog, a decision that almost immediately proved correct. After only one blog post, someone urgently informed me that my comments weren’t working, then Tweeted me a comment. The comment was not ill-meaning, but I felt that it came from an unwillingness to buy into my message. Given that, I’d prefer that it live on Twitter, where it will slide away into the sea of internet obscurity in a week. If it were on my blog, it would be forever attached to the material. I’m glad that I got the feedback, but I’m also glad that it will not be permanently stuck to me.

The other denizens of your digital kingdom will be watching you, looking for signs that you may be relaxing your sovereignty over it. Don’t let them. Own your digital space by making sure that you personally endorse everything that goes into it.

The two ways to control your digital kingdom each require discipline to enforce. Only adding elements to your kingdom that build to the whole requires that you not tweet about how cute your cat is, or publish Facebook game scores to your wall every day. Keeping unwanted elements out requires that you be diligent and firm with your unruly digital peasants.

More than once, people have told me that I take my Internet presence more seriously than I should. I agree that I take it more seriously than most people. However, I believe that in twenty years, our digital expressions will be just as important as clothes, speaking ability, and interpersonal skills to how others perceive us. Among the most digitally savvy people, they already are. When that’s true for everyone, I’ll be ready.