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.
