Have you adjusted your Facebook privacy settings yet? I am one of those aggrieved by Facebook’s shifting of the goalposts over the past few months, and pleased that the European Union took such a strong stance, which is producing results.

In the beginning, Facebook’s genius was that it simplified and practically perfected the means by which people could share with each other online. But not just any people. They managed to create an atmosphere where one could feel like one was in a safe space, among known friends. The pure narcissism of blogging – where one publishes one’s thoughts and opinions to the world, presuming that the world is interested – becomes far less of a pathology on Facebook, where you are only communicating to your own friends and family, whom you know are interested in what’s going on with your life.
However, a recent profile picture of mine, of me holding my precious nephew for the first time, which was lovely for my friends to marvel at, was, I discovered, visible to perfect strangers, due to a change of Facebook’s policy, of which I hadn’t previously been aware. Profile pictures used to be private. It isn’t that I don’t want the world to know there’s a wonderful new member of my family, bringing so much joy to us all. Hell, I’ve felt like shouting it from the rooftops. It is that I hadn’t made the decision to do so; it’s also not my place to put my sister’s family on view for the world to see. It takes a tiny new arrival in one’s life to make one fully alert to (perhaps hitherto dormant) qualities of vulnerability, safety and protectiveness.
One’s online persona is something one creates and curates and tempers, according to whom one wishes to share it with. It’s an expression of your self, as messy or as tidy or as revealing as you wish, just like your bedroom. Very few of us are like Tracy Emin. In a way it’s your intellectual property, your fiction or reality, your memories, your fears, your dreams, your own creation. (You have all added a Creative Commons copyright licence to your Facebook profile, haven’t you? www.url.ie/6bd5)
The shift towards public disclosure of every detail of one’s life, the disregarding of the ownership of personal, private material, is something that this current breed of web entrepreneurs wishes to push. But it’s not from any altruistic motive, that once was commonplace among internet pioneers, surfing an anarchistic collaborative zeitgeist that facilitated the distribution of information to be available to all. That early internet altruism is still at play, in open source software projects like Linux, Wikipedia, Firefox and Wordpress, collective public works that, if measured in hours donated, must rank highly in the list of all human voluntary endeavours. The reward is in the work itself, the satisfaction of contributing to a job well done.
If one considers, however, the notion that there is no such thing as a free lunch, then the tab each of us are building up for the extraordinary repast that is Facebook is mounting up to astronomical levels. I can’t think of any other service that is so popular and so “free”, something which can take up so much time in my life, that I haven’t paid for. Nothing else comes close, except for radio, which is, technically, paid for by those who have televisions, topped up by generally fairly anodine advertising.
However, the most valuable advertising there is, that has ever been and ever will be, is word of mouth. This is what Facebook’s business model is all about. It is uniquely positioned to profit from word of mouth, on an unprecedented scale, by listening to what friends say to each other in confidence. That’s why it is so willing to stretch boundaries of privacy until enough people complain, or until the authorities step in to regulate, by unilaterally changing contracts with its addicted users. We are left scratching our heads, wondering how we could find an alternative way of staying so connected with our friends, and we stay loyal, but a bit more guarded. For a while, until we get used to it.
The pot at the end of the rainbow of all this cyber-friending is gazillions of dollars for Facebook and its investors and advertisers. Tailoring advertising to individual tastes, by linking you and your friends personally to commercial brands, is the holy grail of all marketeers. (This is taken to its logical and scary conclusion in the film Minority Report – www.url.ie/6bdp). At some stage, and the stage is nigh, we begin to pay for all those free lunches by surrendering our privacy, even if it was privacy that was the honey that got us stuck in the trap in the first place.
I am aware of the irony of writing about privacy when, over the years in this column I’ve written about all sorts of experiences and feelings that are usually private. Some gay activists, of which I would count myself one, place the personal in the public sphere as a political act, in order to “normalize” it, in order to challenge prejudices and preconceptions. The older I get, the less inclined I am to reveal the nitty-gritty of my sexual adventurings or my emotional states online, because, in some ways, if something is freely shared with the world, it loses something of its value on a personal level. It’s the paradox of public sharing – intimacy is all about privacy, about choosing to reveal something to someone else that is usually not on display. The more privileged someone feels in being granted access, the deeper the intimacy, the more of a precious gift it becomes, both in the giving and receiving. The loss of intimacy that the internet threatens – so wonderfully portrayed in Ondi Timoner’s award-winning documentary We Live In Public – is something I care about.
Happily, the need for gay people to “rub people’s noses in it” about our personal lives and experiences is lessening in this corner of the world, even though it irritates the likes of Brenda Power. However, recent news from Malawi and Eastern Europe only demonstrates how fragile, transient and fleeting tolerance can be. The single most effective method of changing people’s negative attitudes towards homosexuality is for gay people to come out, so that everyone knows someone who is gay. Because we are usually not as bad as our press, and only occasionally worse.
But coming out has a price. Sex is a lousy marker for identity, it’s far too chaotic and fickle and hormonal and downright dirty. There are far more bisexual people out there who choose to avoid the categorization and the tribalism of “gay” than is commonly realized. The imminent repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” code in the US military, the way in which a gay person could be gay and keep their job as long as they keep it secret, is to be welcomed. However, if that means that a new a sort of “Ask Away, Tell All” culture is ushered in, where, for example, one act of drunken horniness with a fellow soldier becomes the definitive marker of a fully fledged gay identity, I’d be very worried. One has to try to imagine a post-gay world, where orientation is not so significant or polarized or loaded with assumptions or based merely on a sex act. We are far more complex beings than that.
Facebook knows I’m gay. I know this because I get shown ads there, suggesting where I can go to see daily photographs of men in swimwear. I delete it frequently, and I’m asked why I don’t like the ad. I check the box marked “offensive”, and risk sounding like a prude. But I am offended, not by men in swimwear (far from it), but by Facebook.
If it carries on the way it’s going, if governments don’t regulate strongly to protect our privacy, I’ll be out of Facebook in a couple of years. It’s just like any other capitalist enterprise, and capitalism always needs to be kept permanently in check, otherwise it eats itself and ruins the society it feeds off. I guess I’d have to use the telephone more. Yes, it’d be more expensive, but some things are worth paying money for. It’s simpler that way.