Being Social

Welcome to our first blog post. We intend to use the blog to:

• Give an insight of our researches;
• Provide hints and tips to be more productive on Hibe;
• Share newsworthy headlines in the industry.

As it is Hibe’s mission to provide users with life-like interactions, we start the blog by exploring the differences between our online and offline social environments.

In real life, we manage our professional and private lives with relative ease. Families, friends, co-workers, and lovers exist in separate worlds, at separate times. They only come together when we choose. Online, things are way more complicated.

Chris Peterson’s excellent article “Losing Face”, help us understand why.

A – Social Contexts

Following the work of privacy theorist Helen Nissenbaum, Peterson argues that, in life, we are different persons depending on the context of our interactions. To illustrate his point, he uses Rachel, a college student who just received a friend request from her grandmother.

Rachel is normally a completely different person when hanging out with her grandma than with her college friends with whom she shares an extensive party life. She spent years to construct a “perfect angelic self” image for her grandmother, which would be instantly shattered if her relative learns about her college activities. Should Rachel accept her grandmother’s friend request?

Truth is, we all developed social contexts in life. Online, however, we can hardly use them.

Today’s privacy issues often derive from this lack of context support. Social media researcher danah boyd advances the notion of privacy that goes beyond a simple “public” / “private” binary. She argues that privacy is “having control over how information flows”.

Privacy -> Who can see What, When & Where

Think about it. Would you have a conversation with your doctor or your lawyer in a today’s social networks? No. Would you benefit from sharing info with him? Most likely.

B – Norms

Our daily interactions often depend on norms defined by society in general as well as our social contexts. We accept them because they create expectations and enable us to manage our behavior more efficiently. It is the reason we behave differently and expect others to behave differently in a church than in a nightclub.

In the digital realms, these expectations disappear. Rules on social networks are drastically different.

• Information in the real world is often verbal and ephemeral. It now becomes permanent and searchable.
• Typically, social norms relate to corporal situations such as weddings and funerals. Social networks confined them to a single space or “wall”.
• Our parents raised us to behave differently in various situations. Social networks, however, are designed to remove the frontier between each situation, to capture everything you say, and to achieve their financial objectives by monetizing your data. They definitely do not replicate our life.

If we all suddenly become masters in social networks, knowing exactly what information is shared, how, with who, and for how much, would we share our life the same way or would we naturally be more careful about what we say and in which context we say it?

C – Identity, Relationships

In life, we nuance our identity and relationships through time and social contexts. One week of generic posts and a standard profile is hardly a representation of who we are.

We define our identity with the relations we have with our surrounding over a span of time. Here are few examples from my life:

• My relation through the years with my son tells a lot more about me as a dad than just a few pictures of us.
• My log of mountain climbing, which includes dates, locations, photos and comments is infinitely more representative than a simple “I like climbing”.
• My dedication and stubbornness in researching and collecting Gustave Doré’s illustrations shows my attitude in life, not the collection itself.
• I am fortunate enough to have visited many countries and I can guarantee you that the stories behind each visit will tell you a lot more about me than a basic enumeration of the countries visited.

Note that in life, we control:

• What we show and tell in each relationship
• What we want to see and hear from our relationships. People must have the choice of not getting my mountain climbing stories.

Current social networks defaults our identity and our relationships to “profiles”, “status updates”, and “friends”. To present ourselves in a rich manner, we need to either open accounts on a multitude of niche sites or learn how to cheat default settings and try to customize our relationships, none of which is natural, or easy.

D - Audience

Peterson quotes lawyer and technologist James Grimmelmann to illustrate this point. “[We] don’t say private things when the wrong people are listening in.”

In life, we have an innate ability to be constantly aware of our surrounding. We adapt our behavior based who we think can see or hear us. To help us, we have a judiciary system that protects our privacy against technological intrusion and limits its use to security-related situations.

Online, however, laws cannot govern who looks at us. In general, social networks state that their “Terms and Agreements” give them the right to nearly anything with our data. The fact is, everything is stored, analyzed and often redistributed to several parties for commercial reasons.

Social networks make sure that it becomes nearly impossible to define who listens to us.

Overall, the discrepancy between our real and online lives is the fundamental drive behind Hibe. We aim to give users the same freedom of choice they have in reality. We believe in our right to privacy.

Images by lamebook.com and Lorri37 (Wikimedia Commons)