We created The Albion Society as a place to debate in depth some of the more vexing issues that we come up against in our frantic day-to-day jobs.
It’s 2008, so every meeting must use the phrase ‘social network’ at least once. And because we’re all fully Facebooked we don’t mind a bit of that (as long as it’s for the right reason, not just trendy media box-ticking).
But we’re also aware that the dialogue in the media is changing already from “look at the funny old man on YouTube” to “MySpace wrecked my house”. Privacy issues are coming to the fore. Yesterday “Paris Hilton’s Facebook account was hacked” (although she seems to have some history of a reckless attitude to her personal content!).
So we wanted to use the second meeting of The Albion Society
to have a good old debate about this privacy dilemma, and see if we
could sort it out in our own heads at least. The title for the session
was ‘is social media the future of communications, or the end of
individual privacy as we know it?’ To help us debate it, we asked along
a few friends and associates to share their views.
Gi Fernando of Techligtenment, a leading social media application developer, argued that social media platforms such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn are
simply modern incarnations of age-old social relationships such as the
traditional village culture where everyone knows everything about
everyone else. On privacy, Gi argued that the power of social
marketing isn’t driven by the highly personal data such as age or
religious belief that consumers are overly sensitive about, but rather
by the information that they’re proud to place on their profiles such
as the bands or the movies they love.
Saul Klein, Partner at Index Ventures and investor in social networks Dopplr and Kindo, started by pointing out that the web’s success stories have always been social, whether eBay’s buying-and-selling community, Amazon’s recommendations, or Google’s PageRank
search algorithm. He then framed the debate about trust by pointing out
that if Google or eBay had lost 50,000 personal records in the same way
as the UK government recently admitted to, their share-price would have plummeted – a pretty effective incentive to protect our privacy?
Chris Hackford, Legal Partner at the IPA (and
currently writing papers on data privacy) made clear that the Law is
years behind the technology, and is unable to keep up with the pace of
change of social media, and so there is no likelihood of regulation in
the near future. Chris also focused the debate down to control. The
issue is yielding control of personal content and preferences to
others. when people post content that includes your image, how can you
control who sees it?
So the answer to our question? Well, both
probably. Social media is the future of communications, because it was
also the past. And, yes, it probably does signal the end of some of the
barriers we have put up between the individual and society in the West.
What
became clear is that subtly different types of relationships that exist
in the real world (and the etiquette and codes that have developed over
thousands of years to help us understand and deal with them) have yet
to transfer into the frontierland of social media. The one dimensional
notion of ‘friend’ will need to develop and become more textured – Facebook's recent ‘privacy’ improvements (probably more accurately termed ‘control’ improvements) are just the start.
The
Albion Society is a regular forum for entrepreneurial doers to share
their vision, and debate it enthusiastically with like-minded people.
If you fancy coming along to the next meeting of The Albion Society, drop us a line.
