Please vote for my session at South by Southwest; I’d be most honored if you do. Here’s the description:
In our current cultural obsession with privacy, we risk losing the benefits of publicness—of the connections the internet enables.
So, in a discussion, we will consider the value of publicness in our lives and communities, in transparent government, and in truly public companies. We will ask what privacy really means and examine its brief history (it was born out of fear of new technologies, especially the dastardly Kodak camera).
We will discuss the ethics of privacy and publicness that should inform our decisions in social and business interactions: what we reveal, what we keep private, and why.
We will look at different cultures’ views of privacy (how the Germans, who get naked in saunas and public parks, care deeply about the privacy of everything … except their private parts).
We will ask what Facebook, Foursquare, Google, Twitter, government, and companies should do about privacy.
We will claim ownership of the public sphere–what’s public is owned by us, the public.
And we will forge a bill of rights in cyberspace to protect the openness of the internet that is our tool of making publics.
Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do? and the upcoming Public Parts, will present his findings and views about publicness—and his own experience revealing his prostate cancer–and then lead a discussion with the entire room—Oprah-like—about the nature of privacy and why it worries us.
The format tells us to list five questions the session will answer. Mine:
What does privacy really mean?
What are the benefits of sharing (and oversharing)?
How can we achieve open government and business?
How can we protect the openness of the internet?
What’s wrong with Jeff Jarvis’ penis?
