When I first started surfing the internet in 1997, on a painfully slow old PC in my high school library, anonymity was the name of the game.
My friends and I would talk to strangers in chat rooms, but we were always careful to obscure any pertinent details about ourselves -- not only our names, but our ages, the color of our hair, which part of the city we lived in. My first website was created under a pseudonym, using a photo of a little-known actress who bore a vague (if better looking) resemblance to my teenage self.
It wasn't that we wanted to create alternative lives or personas for ourselves; it was that we were acutely aware of what the consequences of going public with our personal information might be. Back in the late-'90s, the internet was seen as a mire of pedophiles and potential stalkers. To say nothing of the potential ridicule if the girls we went to school with got an inkling of what was really going on inside our heads.
Ten years later, the online world is a very different place. For one, I don't need to take a book with me every time I log on to keep me entertained while I wait for a new page to load.
For another, despite UK journalist Martin Foley's much-publicized investigation into pedophilia on Skype, and despite MySpace's recent removal of almost 30,000 known sex offenders from its database, most people who use the internet regularly now know that the majority of people they talk to online are as normal as they are.
One of the reasons we know this is because the net is a lot less anonymous than it used to be. Teenagers, in particular, still tend to obscure any details that might identify them -- their full name, age, where they go to school -- but Second Life aside, for the most part, the social networking phenomenon is about being yourself.
These days -- again, Second Life aside -- it is only the very unstable and insecure who adopt false identities online. For those not "in" on it themselves, it can be hard to fathom why anyone would want to share their thoughts, their photographs and their contact details with everyone they've ever met, or anyone they haven't. New York magazine has dubbed the younger generation's less private approach to privacy the cause of "alarm and misapprehension not seen since the early days of rock and roll."
The most popular explanation for the popularity of websites such as Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and LiveJournal is simple narcissism. The detailed lists of interests and carefully compiled photo galleries that profiles tend to feature, along with a tendency to accumulate "friends" like baseball cards, certainly support this. But this interpretation misses a vital part of the equation. These sites are popular because they allow users to share who they are and what they care about with their friends and communities and, in the process, connect with other people in a way that usually facilitates rather than replaces offline interaction.
Information is the currency that builds these connections, and the incentives to share it are significant. The trouble is that the compulsion to be candid can dull any real understanding of who has the ability to view what you're posting.
Most social networking sites have customizable privacy settings, but they don't allow for the nuances we apply when we divulge and filter information about ourselves offline -- best friend, acquaintance, ex-boyfriend, boss -- let alone the nuances within each category. And because the trend is towards openness and self-revelation, it's easy to over-share from time to time.
You might call such candidness madness. Then again, you could equally argue that it's madness to expect that one's personal details will be kept private in an age where almost everyone is "Googleable." For many under-30s, even if you're not posting about yourself online, chances are someone you know is doing it for you.
There are obvious pitfalls here. More than one beauty queen has landed in hot water after suggestive party photos were taken from their Facebook profiles and circulated on the internet. A top Yale law student was rejected for graduate jobs at 16 firms due to sexually malicious postings about her on the widely read message board AutoAdmit -- she later sued.
It has been argued that 20 years in the future, when virtually everyone has a backlog of life history available online, no one will care about compromising photos taken at university parties, or dramatic outpourings of teenage angst. Better yet, maybe employers, prospective partners and future mothers-in-law will have the savvy to differentiate between reliable information and unqualified hearsay.
Perhaps we'll all end up like celebrities and politicians, carefully monitoring the information we let out into the world and how it is presented. Or maybe we just won't care as much about the personal-life scandals of politicians and celebrities once our own lives have been put under the microscope.
But for now we're in that awkward, adolescent, transitional phase, forced to negotiate between our desire to be known, and our desire not to have the world know everything about us.
And for now, in a culture fixated on drawing out the most inconsequential, out-of-context remarks and information and holding them up as if they indicate some greater truth about the person who made them, it pays to be careful about what you put out for public consumption. After all, you never know who's watching.
First published in The Melbourne Age, August 12, 2007