At some point, there will be a generation whose entire life history, from cradle to grave, will be documented online.
Soon thereafter, the archives containing all of that data will be made public.
At that point, I think it's plausible that people will adopt radically different attitudes towards online sharing. By the 23rd century personal logs would tend to stay more personal, parents would think more carefully about putting their child's life-story into the public domain, and willfully living in social silos may come to be seen as pathetically parochial.
> At that point, I think it's plausible that people will adopt radically different attitudes towards online sharing.
That's a fairly tame prediction. Most of the benefit we get from keeping secrets is either temporary (I don't want my boss to know I'm looking for another job; I don't want my wife to know I'm having an affair) or only benefits us if everyone else keeps the same secrets so it becomes a taboo (I'm gay; I don't believe in God; I have embarrassing sexual fetishes; I have fringe political beliefs). The first kind we don't care about keeping after death unless we're especially vain and famous enough people would care, and the second kind is only work keeping secret if everyone else keeps it secret.
I can't imagine a huge backlash against sharing and social networking once it becomes culturally engrained; instead, insistence on privacy will be seen as suspicious and eccentric.
I only have anecdotal evidence but my observation has been that the set of things people decide to share is motivated by the facade they want to create. Once all that stuff gets analyzed in the aggregate, future historians will be able to paint a more complete picture of people's lives. My prediction depends on how ugly that picture turns out to be.
Ugly is culturally relative. Fifty years ago, people would be horrified to find out how many people were gay. Today, we're horrified to find out that gay people felt the need to stay in the closet.
Agreed, 'ugly' is culturally relative. I'm interested in what happens when cultural norms change a lot in the span of 20 years yet everyone's real history is public domain.
First, 23rd century is a very long shot.
It's like trying to predict 20th century from 17th.
You can only realistically figure out something about mid-21st.
And I bet the events described by you would cause people to start caring even less about privacy.
What's the big deal about data becoming public if it's old and nobody reads it any more? Because each second produces more data than you can possibly care?
I was being a little tongue-in-cheek as far as predicting the 23rd century (the article was about the DS9 era of Star Trek).
My thesis is that people do care about privacy but are motivated to share in order to portray a certain image. They don't want all of the ugly stuff revealed. So I don't see how people will start caring less about privacy when they realize that they don't have any control over their image.
Soon thereafter, the archives containing all of that data will be made public.
At that point, I think it's plausible that people will adopt radically different attitudes towards online sharing. By the 23rd century personal logs would tend to stay more personal, parents would think more carefully about putting their child's life-story into the public domain, and willfully living in social silos may come to be seen as pathetically parochial.