Infinite Path

This weekend, the Crunchie awards took place in San Francisco. Among the highlights was a talk from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who talked to an attentive crowd about the most popular social networking site in the world. The most interesting part of Zuckerberg’s speech was arguably his comments about the evolution of privacy online.

Zuckerberg, who is still just 25 years of age, was quoted as saying that a few years ago, when Facebook was in its very early stages and the manner in which it was to become a household name was a distant dream for its founder, “the question a lot of people asked was, ‘why would I want to put any information on the internet at all?’”. He continued to reveal that some people had questioned his desire to have a website at all.

Fast-forward just a few years, though, and it’s easy to see the remarkable transition which has occured. Now, according to Zuckerberg, the new social norm is that people are comfortable “sharing more information” with “more people” across the world.

What he’s saying is difficult to deny on a broad level; we now share the minutiae of our daily lives with people we have never even met without thinking about it twice. However, for many people, this kind of  all-inclusive access does not sit comfortably with the way they want to lead their lives. The number of people who view Facebook and other sites like it as a haven for individuals and organisations who want easy access to personal information is far from negligible and Zuckerberg’s comments could, to these individuals, come across as further justification of a Big Brother-esque online world that hands those connected to the social networking website a tidy profit. 

Depending upon how much of your life you share with the online community and the level of interaction you have on sites such as Twitter and Facebook, you are likely to view Zuckerberg’s comments as an accurate reflection of social evolution in a world becoming increasingly reliant upon technology, or as a low level form of brainwashing, with the company keen to enforce their own norms and values to those who have to live with the consequences.