Just listened to an edition of Radio Open Source on the NSA wiretapping case, and was struck by how well the topic maps to social networks as we know and use them. Privacy, degrees of separation, pattern analysis, and more. With comments by William Gibson!
Patrick Radden Keefe: I was talking to a bunch of high-school kids about a month ago, talking about the government surveillance, and the Bush administration’s moral-less eavesdropping, and was meeting with dead uninterested stares from these high-school juniors.
Eventually the Q&A started, nobody seemed very engaged, and a certain point I said “Why doesn’t this concern you, aren’t you worried about the government?” And after a pause a girl in the back row raised her hand and said “We’re worried about our parents!”Chris Lydon: Meaning what?
Patrick Radden Keefe: Privacy from their parents. In a very micro-context, within the realm of their family, they’re worried about their parents knowing what they did online. But anybody outside that family capacity: let ‘em at it!
There’s a kind of impersonal space in the Internet, that they figure: “Somebody could look into it, but it’s impersonal enough, so why would they be interested.”
