Ian M Rountree

Copywriter, Project Manager, Digital Marketing

The Assumption of Witness

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Two situations. You tell me which one is more confusing.

1. You, and two colleagues are at a baseball game.

Halfway through the game, your chatter turns to work. One of your colleagues makes a comment to your other colleague that makes you intensely uncomfortable – perhaps it’s an attack on the second person, perhaps it’s a sexual slight against a fellow colleague not at the event. Either way, if it were in a workplace, it would be harrassment.

But you’re at a baseball game – a social event. Is it harrassment?

2. You post something on a colleague’s Facebook wall.

You intend it as a joke – but a third party, who is Friends with both of you, makes a complaint to HR, and all of the associated fun with a harrassment suit begins.

The comment was made off work hours, on your home computer – indeed, Facebook is blacklisted on the company network, and it’s impossible to make this kind of joke at work. But still, the complaint has been made.

Which one of these is the bigger problem?

This is an issue fundamental to the problem businesses have with social media; despite all sanctions, we’re still running into many of the same problems. In either of these situations, the trouble a business faces is whether or not these work-related comments are under their purview of care for their employees. Where does work end, and casual relationship begin?

We thought blacklists and policy would declaw the cat as far as social media goes, but people keep ending up with scratch marks.

This specific hypothetical came out of the #QNet2011 conference panels, where (Modern Earth client) Jeff Couture of The Proactive Circle spoke up during a question about harrassment and cyber wellness; his scenarios (the ones above) touch on this conundrum quite well.

Here’s the crux of it; there’s an assumption that people witness what we do in person, but do not witness what we do online.

In a group of three people, any comment is going to be heard by all three. Even if we suffer from filter failure once in a while, we can safely assume that anything said in that group should be the speaker’s real opinion. Thus, harrassment is obvious, and the only question is whether or not comments off the workplace clock and site will affect workplace performance.

Adding social media into the picture creates a new problem; socially, we’re not developed well yet to handle asynchronicity. It’s not a problem of people being any bolder, or relying on pseudo-anonymity. It’s the idea that we’re used to witnesses only being present at the time of the offence – whether we perceive an offence or not. But online, everything is on record. Even when we write blogs in our boxers, we’re on record. If we detail our bathroom habits, it’s on record.

If we praise or ridicule a coworker online, it’s on record. Temporal witness becomes eternal witness.

How do we deal with this?

Sure, we can censor ourselves, but that’s a patch not a fix. Sure, we can police public profiles in some instances – but what about the future, when all employees are expected to be social advocates for their companies, and proudly bear their corporate badges even when they sleep, through their social web presence?

This is foolish, magical thinking at best.

I really wish I had an answer for you on this one; should we be treating the social web the same, given the difference in assumption of witness? Or do we just need to grow better foresight and learn to account for asynchronous discovery or our communication failures?

What do you think?

 

Video Saturdays – m00t’s TED Talk on Anomymity

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One of the biggest powers behind anonymity on the web is Anonymous. On this video, the founder of 4chan, Christopher “m00t” Poole, makes a case for the power of anonymity.

In the middle to late nineties, anonymity on the web was a foregone conclusion. Screen names, multiple personae – there was no way to take an accurate census of the web. In fact, there still isn’t. Anonymity is an interesting trade – we give up a number of the things that make us who we are (our identity, if not our demeanour, as well as our personal network) and gain the “everyone could be a murderer” power over those we need to communicate with. In essence, we trade clout for threat – or, perhaps, we trade the possibility of personal repercussions for a unique kind of agility and nomadic freedom.

If you can’t see the video, See m00t’s address on TED Talks.

What are your thoughts on anonymity?

Privacy, Courage and Anonymity

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photo by Joe Shlabotnik
photo by Joe Shlabotnik

When all reasonable expectation is removed from a prospect, behaving as if the expectation still existed is madness.

There’s a fundamental difference between privacy and lack of disclosure I think people need to get their heads around. Privacy intimates that the things you don’t want found, don’t get found. Or, if someone intentionally finds them out, that you have some form of recourse appropriate to their improper disclosure. Perfect example of this: Tiger Woods. It’s unfortunate that he felt he could send text messages to his mistresses over the years, because he was placing proof of his actions in their hands, and in the hands of his cellular service providers. That’s not breach of privacy, that’s disclosure. On the flip side, go ahead and try to figure out whether I like jam or peanut butter on my toast. If I don’t tell you, you won’t; that’s not privacy, that’s lack of disclosure.

If we neglect to send drunken college photos of ourselves to Facebook, are we protecting our privacy? Yes. But what about uploading the photos and then jacking up the privacy so high that your friends can barely find the pictures? Are you protecting your privacy then?

No. You’re being an idiot.

Not following me? Let me paint this another way. Let’s say you’re a big fan of downloading content. You BitTorrent every new movie as it comes out, every album, everything. You get so prolific with this, so involved in the community that you sign up for accounts with Demonoid and everyone else you can think of and go from being a participant to being a provider. You’re smart – you colocate on a server slice using proxies, never use your own name in context with your filesharing. But still, you do this, and you get sued into oblivion by the RIAA or somesuch. Did anonymity help you protect your privacy? Not a chance. Anonymity is useless online. Your actions as a net become visible by their nature as protected. It’s like a permanent Streisand Effect; you’re asking for exposure. Are you protecting your privacy by being anonymous? Maybe for a while, but the tools available mean this tactic is only as effective as your actions are ignorable. As soon as you breach the invisible line of big-fish-ness, you’re screwed.

And if you’re on the exposing side? Are you doing the courageous thing by outing those who have been stupid enough to lay themselves partially bare out of ignorance? Well, not likely. If it’s your job, there’s no courage involved here. If not, you’re just a bully. Granted, some people deserve it (read as, people who don’t even try to click the privacy boxes). But don’t confuse cutting insight with courage. Sharing your opinion is so possible it’s nearly mandatory at this point, so get the legs out from under your high horse and make sure what you’re doing is of real utility to people before you worry about how brave you are.

So why network at all, you ask? Because you get to meet new people. You expand your influence and business potential. You make more money, know more about everything, and expose yourself to varied input, thus becoming a bigger person than you could otherwise. We’re not yet in a space where shyness is punished, but it’s coming, trust me.

At the end of the day, you can’t rely on privacy policies, because those can chance without notice. You also can’t rely on your cloak and dagger anonymity, because tools exist that demolish this with rigid celerity. Instead, if you don’t want it repeated, don’t say it in the first place.

Anonymity On The Web

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I kept myself totally invisible on the web for years – lots of people do this. I took lengths to make myself un-Google-able. I used proxy names, kept multiple email accounts, never mentioned myself. It was all very Locke and Demosthenes, really, but i took a lot of energy.

So what changed? Well, for one thing, identity fraud got big. In a couple of circles, variants of my names were being used as poseurs, which was frustrating. For another, I started paying attention to how bigger media players were actually getting noticed. If you listen to talk on even the geekiest of forums, you don’t see screen names any more. The Mandrakes and CmdrTaco’s of the world are falling down, replaced by real people using their real identities. This is a phenomenon, this personal branding. It’s a big deal.

If you’re not keeping up you’re falling behind. I know technology is hard to keep up with. Social media is growing geometrically on a daily basis, and you don’t grow with it. This is worth noting, and it’s something worth taking advantage of. You may not be scaleable, but the net is.(that one’s not mine, go subscribe to Media Hacks and listen to the backlog.)

I’ve said before that businesses would fail if they tried to think on the scale of the internet, but there are a lot of instances where individuals (mostly marketers, bizarrely, not IT professionals) have succeeded. It’s worth giving a shot to, in the interest of developing your own footprint as well as building your business. I know that sounds conradictory, but I’ll give you a few examples.

It’s fairly easy to expose yourself to others – Twitter, Facebook, MySpace. To a lesser extent Flickr and other services. Finding people of like mind, or who have things to add to your conversation is simple, as long as you’re looking. For example; I followed a trail of podcasts and websites, which started with Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation blog, through Media Hacks to Chris Brogan, Marketing Over Coffee, Gary Vaynerchuk and Seth Godin. In the comments for some of these, I found Mark Dykeman, Milk Muny, and Twitter. Yes, I hadn’t even used Twitter before I read the Six Pixels blog. Now, Twitter is an essential tool in exposure – finding people to follow is really simple. I’ve used Buzzom, I have UberTwitter on my BlackBerry, and TweetDeck on my laptop.

It’s also simple to make yourself available to be found – which is part of what I was speaking of in my recent Exposure rant. Get on blogger. Or TypePad. Get your name as a .com or .net and make yourself a presense. Whether it’s a blog, a showcase of some kind, or even just a brochureware style virtual business card, it’s worth having a presense. Get on Twitter, or Facebook, or even Plurk, MySpace or any of the other social networking sites – this is less my specialty than it is some of the people I’ve mentioned, so read their sites, they’ve got good advice and act as great examples. Being out there is just as important sometimes as being active – if you can be found, and make yourself available, you’ve got that much less push to keep people finding you.

I’m not arguing against privacy, I’m saying that anonymity is dead. The idea that creating a persona for yourself is the best way to gain interest is gone. The need to hide because of your statements is, in a lot of places, false – exposure means someone will always back you, even if you’re contraversial. If you want to stay private, stay offline. If you want something kept private in public, there are means – screen names and proxies are some of these, but they’re so severely limiting and limited at this point that you need to be conscious that using the anonymity of the net exclusively as a key to getting your message out will eventually fail you. People dig. It’s nature.

I’ve made some changes recently – so I’ll use them as further examples. I’ve got a google profile, I changed my Twitter username to my own name (@IanMRountree, find me, my follow list is sad and small). When this domain expires, I’ll be registering some variant on my full name to use as a .com as well, and combining the stream here with the archives for Why Read The Manual! because that project is more tied to myself than it is to my need to become a business. I also cross-link an absurd amount of stuff from here to Twitter to Facebook to FriendFeed – eventually, when I have time, I’ll be trying to create different conversations in each of these channels, but in the mean time, mirroring is all I have time for. It keeps me active on many more channels than I would otherwise have time to maintain – which is at the heart of what I mean when I say you can use the scaleability of the internet to your advantage: Being bigger than your schedule allows for is so possible it’s mediocre. Which means if you’re not taking advantage, either it’s not your thing (valid) or you’re missing out.

I want to know what you think. If you use a proxy, why do you do it?

Conversely, if you use your own name, as I’ve been doing more and more lately, why do you feel safe doing that instead of making up a kickass online persona who is inevitably much more fancy than you are in real life?