On Mar 9, 2012, at 11:53 PM, steve harley wrote: > on 2012-09-03 17:02 Larry Colen wrote >> It's my feeling that privacy is, for the most part, an anomalous concept in >> human society nearly unique to our time and culture. For most of human >> history, most people lived in small villages, or nomadic tribes, generally >> sharing one room houses (or tents) with their whole family. Basically, if >> you did something, pretty much everyone in your world knew about it. Yes, >> it's possible to sneak around, for a little bit. > > it's an interesting thought experiment, but first of all in the US since 1967 > there has been formalized a reasonable expectation of privacy, and it stems > from the Constitution, so i would say it predates "our time"
You are correct. And the privacy that someone living in 18th century London or Paris might have had, especially if they were wealthy, is a far cry from the privacy that peasants in a small farming village might have had. Also, if human history spans 50,000 years, then the past 500 years is merely one percent of that. > > i do get your point, but do you really know what people experienced in the > "tribal" societies you imagine? first of all, was there as much information > gathering and storage potential? second was it good? … was their level of > repression, unfairness, mental anguish, etc. perhaps higher than ours? All valid points. I do know the differences in living in a small town and living in a big city. I've also spent times in tighter knit social groups, and in more loosely knit ones, or without much of a close social network. I know how gossip works, and how in a tight knit community how hard it is to do things without it becoming common knowledge. This not being written as a defensible doctoral dissertation, I was more interested in presenting broad points for people to think about, than arguing that things must be a certain way. > > and third, were there social constructs, tools or people as well-trained that > could so powerfully as today exploit knowledge about others for greed, fear, > or power? You mean like in the book the scarlet letter? > >> Let's say that google knows that you've been doing searches on third party >> batteries for the K-5, and for some reason, that information becomes public. >> How is that going to hurt you? > > again, the fallacy that anyone should have access to all your information > unless you can show how it might harm you That is not what I was saying. I'm saying that people are all up in arms about the aggregation of knowledge, about people finding things out about you. I understand the emotional reaction. I'm merely positing the question "How does it harm you for people to know these things?". I'm not asking whether it is right or wrong for them, I'm just asking that once you get past your knee jerk reaction that you don't want others to know these things, in what way does their knowing them harm you? > > >> We are definitely going through a transitional period. It's going to be >> very interesting to see how culture changes when the people who grew up with >> broadband internet access are old enough to be the ones in positions of >> power. People who had daily conversations with friends all over the world, >> long before they were forty years old. People that by the time they were >> forty, already had twenty five years of pictures of things that seemed like >> a good idea at the time (out with friends and possibly after several drinks) >> posted on the web. > > my Internet (well, Usenet) postings from 1979 or 1980 are still archived; i'm > not terribly ashamed of them, but i'm not going to point them out for you I came late to the game, ten years or so after you, and even so much earlier than most people over the age of forty. I would guess that 90% of the people with net, or web, access have had it for less than 10 years. I had discussions with my sister over how much unsupervised access it was safe for my, now 17 year old, nephew to have when he was 14. To her, the web was a strange and dangerous place which filled her with fear and dread. I suspect that when he has children at that age, he will be far less worried for their safety from web access. -- Larry Colen [email protected] sent from i4est -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
