beyond140’s posterous

There isn't anything wrong with the question, "Why do you protect your updates?" It is obvious to me that when someone protects their updates on Twitter, or only allows friends to see their Facebook page, or anything similar they have a reason. It does seem a bit presumptuous to me that some feel they can question your choices.

I'm intrigued that you feel the need to publicly defend a private choice (by you or others) to keep your conversations private.

But I am curious about an implementation detail. What happens when you have a conversation with someone who doesn't protect their updates? Or do you simply avoid such conversations?

I can't remember if danah boyd talks about this aspect of privacy, but it strikes me as a challenge if maintaining privacy requires all participants in conversations to share expectations of privacy--on a platform where the default behavior is for all conversations to be public.

Daniel, I was compelled to write this post by several comments over the past months from people who took objection with those, like me, who have protected updates because we were, according to these people, "getting Twitter wrong."

I also heard several similar comments voiced in Friend Feed. I felt these comments were inappropriate and, at worst, coercive in the context of people who might not know how to use Twitter but feel compelled to do it "right" (not in a personally meaningful way).

As for the conversations thing. That's the only downside of being private - and I do see it as a downside. If somebody is intrigued by something they find in another person's feed that links back to me they can request a follow.

Otherwise, the larger problem for me is the RSS aggregation of all our public tweets. That was the primary reason I chose to go private. Far less to do with my conversations or network but the desire to contain my activities - at least the activities I'm generating - within my own feed -- unless people RT, which is fine. I have made a social contract by engaging others who have public feeds simply by following them and talking to them.

I'm just not into generating data only to find it fed into some creepy automated adword site or some nefarious aggregation that I don't have any control over. People are generating thousands of tweets. That's millions of copies of conversations distributed all over the place. I'm surprised this isn't concerning to more people.

finally, i found someone telling in an articulated way what I have been trying to explain this to others: Why I keep my twitter protected? So thanks! I am not interested in just augmenting my list of followers, not my goal. As make more deliberate choices about who follows me, I find the dialogues much more deeper, exploring its
potential uses in education, public health, e-learning, etc. rather than just as a
marketing tool, a personal identity affirming process, or many other goals people have as they engage in these twitter mediated dialogues, while I also want to know who is following me. So thanks, And, yes, others can read messages that are re-distributing but that's different, that's an option the other is making. Having the option is what makes the difference here, and hopefully those options of privacy will continue to develop since they are one of those aspects that need attention. The ability to own your discourse and erase your path if needed.

Melanie, thanks for the explanation. I suspect I use Twitter in almost the opposite way that you do--extending a public persona that is centered around my blog. I am careful about whom I follow, in order to allocate scarce attention budget, but I'm oblivious to who follows me. Actually, not so much oblivious as hopeful that I'll be heard by people whom I want to influence. I still have private conversations, but largely through email and direct messaging.

Anyway, I'm sorry to hear that people give you grief about it. I've celebrated the availability of public conversation and evangelized it, but I hope I've never been so rude as to criticize people who choose to be more private. Besides, if anyone is "getting Twitter wrong", it's people who see it as a game where the goal is to get the most points--I mean, followers. But that's a different conversation. :-)

Two points I left out above:

1) being a woman online presents different kinds of safety issues.

2) being a teacher online presents different kinds of boundary issues.

Both of these involve personal stories and examples I cannot share in a public space. And this is the third reason.

3) Some of the reasons people have for more stealthy boundaries and privacy settings are, in and of themselves, personal.

It's not about having secrets, having something to hide or any other coercive admonishment, it's about the freedom to determine with whom and under what circumstances we share.

It is unfortunate that there is pressure to explain your stance. Like others I think you are using twitter differently than I do, which is just fine by me. There is no "right" way to use an emergent medium.

I guess I've just never thought of Twitter as the sort of place you'd want to have any kind of private conversation - I'd rather use email, IM or Facebook with lots of privacy filters for that. Or the phone or f2f, of course! But I suppose there are differences - Twitter allows you to send out msgs without knowing the other person's listening right then (different from IM) and it means there's soemthing there from your friends when you log on.

But there are certainly a lot of different ways of using Twitter - interesting how everyone thinks THEIR way is the right way...

Great to bring this out. I tell enough people to stop putting their information out in public. My tweets are only locked because I don't want people to follow me... only friends. But since I'm a prof., most of my info is publicly available anyway. :)

Jill, it's not that I want to have "private" conversations with people. It's that I want to have conversations within a network of my choosing. Nearly 300 people is hardly private. People RT my stuff, @ me and etc. Their replies are distributed. If others want to join in they can request subscription. I use "privacy" in the context of a choice about who I'm sharing with, not privacy in the context of the nature of my content - sorry, I thought I made all that clear ... and, again, the larger reasoning here has far less to do with my conversations (which are by and large extremely generic) but my decision not to aggregate my content to the far reaches of the internet.

Hi Melanie! Thanks for writing this. I understood where you were coming from before, but now that you have articulated it 140 characters, it's even clearer.

What's even more clear is that everyone uses Twitter differently and that it's presumptuous for anyone to claim someone else is "doing it wrong." That didn't stop me, of course, from creating this tongue-in-cheek prod:

http://tinyurl.com/b2nhuf

Which definitely contributed fuel to the fire, and I'm sorry if that angered you. You and a couple others responded, and I revised the image as follows:

http://tinyurl.com/c2lcr8

Which I think is the point I was going for. Twitter for _me_ is professional, and almost totally impersonal; I nearly always tweet about things of interest to me as an educator. Fellow educators building their professional learning networks need to understand that the more you 'give' to the network, the more you 'get' from it, and sharing updates is really crucial. It's how I've built my network, which is, at the moment, one of the most powerful tools available to me as a 21st century educator.

That said, it seems that few people use twitter in this way. For them, twitter is more of a mashup of work, life, love, frustration, inspiration, everything grand and glorious and also (seemingly) minor & inconsequential. I totally get that in these cases, protecting updates makes sense. Doesn't take a lot of imagination to envision someone tweeting about 'going out for a run' and putting themselves or their property at risk. It's way too easy to find people these days, especially those of us who are most 'clickable.'

So, I totally get your point. At the same time, I want others, particularly educators, to understand that to truly experience the power of twitter as a learning and networking tool, in my opinion, unprotecting updates - and keeping them professionally focused - is critical.

Heck, some people even create different twitter accounts for their different identities. Whatever works!

Thanks for the explanation, and for giving me a platform to explain myself!

Your twitter friend,

-kj-

Kevin (my Twitter friend),

First of all - thank you for this thoughtful reply. I have enormous respect for you as an innovative educator and as a great all around person. When I wrote this post I didn't have you in mind - although your funny picture from the other day and our resulting conversation relates.

There is a part of me that almost wrote "if I can get enough good arguments to make my feed public, I will." I realise that the issue isn't whether there are good reasons to have a public feed - that is ABUNDANTLY clear. Especially for educators and for the reasons you list above. If you do Twitter well, and responsibly, you have no reason to be concerned about your professional reputation. My larger concern is, again, the long term profile of my data - where it's going and what it will be used for/aggregated into.

I also think that having this privacy setting allows me to have a choice about the, maybe, 1 per cent of people I wouldn't want to have access to my conversations.

In the end, I'm always making noise about granularity of user controls. I wrote many posts like this about what was missing from Facebook and why that was an issue several years ago. Now they have changed a lot of the settings. These changes generally don't happen without people talking about and specifically asking for them.

So perhaps what I'd like is the option to offer an RSS or not offer an RSS of my content, to make it, possibly, subscribe only but not necessarily closed. I'd be OK with that.

This is a bracing and nuanced conversation, and I'm grateful for it. Beyond the question to protect or not to protect updates, it seems that we should be asking whether it's anyone's business whether one protects or not. Why does twitter make an issue of it? Also, protection could be given with much greater granularity--tweet by tweet, rather than as a blanket account setting. There could be a check box saying "make this tweet a feed." A feature like this would be much more in keeping with the libertarian rights paradigm Cory defends in his terrific talk. Do any of the third-party apps, like TweetDeck, provide this functionality?

After reading your post I had a thought: if one invests in net security from the "get-go" then you don't have to worry about privatizing your tweets. It's built into your personal security system. For example, I have learned to write about events in my life without divulging where I live or who I hang out with. I talk about my children but never mention their names or show their photos. I've just learned to question the information I'm putting on the net at all times. And it's now a natural and easy process.

Jeff: again, for me the issue is not the *content* or nature of that data but the distribution of that data. I don't want endless copies of my conversations distributed throughout the internet (regardless of whether what I'm talking about is important or valued). I simply choose not to distribute certain types of information. Just like in Facebook we can choose to keep ourselves unsearchable (i.e., *I* choose who I want to be in my network, not leave it up to others to "find" me), who we wish to display our friends list to (i.e., not wanting strangers knowing who our family, friends and business clients are). Boundaries, just like we have in real life, still matter. Remarkable to me that people are so quick abandon this essential social metric in favour of "right now" "everybody else is doing it" logic.

@ Melanie Careful, your response to Jeff may put you in the same camp as those you wrote this post to. Again there is nothing wrong with asking the question, "Why don't you protect your updates?" The problem happens when you assign judgment before you get the answer.

The fact that social "boundaries" change can be difficult for some people, including the people that think you are wrong for protecting your tweets and the people that think it is wrong to not protect them.

To be clear, I don't filter my content on the internet because I want to be transparent. What I do here is only a small part of who I am, but that small part is open for anyone to see. Your choice to set "walls" up is a personal choice. My choice to not set "walls" up is mine. I don't feel the need to judge peoples motives about why they do these things.

Hi Melanie,
Great post. I would like to point out that for men there can be good reasons to make their tweets private as well. I have a friend who, after a particularly intense breakup, kept his tweets private. Each time he tweets, he receives a harrassing email from the ex, even thought she's blocked from his tweets and he removed her friends as well. She's bullying him, constantly and it's not okay.. trying to take power where she doesn't deserve it.

I don't think there is any reason to defend making tweets private.

If people don't get it, well, it can be explained but it's not something they have to get.

The other day I had a woman lash out at me on twitter for not following back everyone who follows me. She followed 6k people and I pointed out that there was no way she could read all those people all the time. I actually wanted a list of people I could reasonably follow. In other words we all have our own way of doing it, and while people may be judgmental, I was not judgmental of her for giving those she follows a false sense that she actually reads all their stuff.

Live and let live. People have their reasons.

Regarding power, I think that is a far more important aspect to this. Personal power, where one doesn't feel intimidated (ex. my tweets are public because I'm careful to only post things I'm comfortable with but also because I don't think people can hurt me with that level of care) is hard. Many do not feel secure or have personal power to the same degree and I can totally understand why they might make their tweets private to deal with it.

The real issue for me is who has power, perceived by the community, but often not perceived because power grabs often occur in small and invisible ways to the community between small groups (of 2 or so?) Those smaller more private interactions are the places most vulnerable to abuses. And that's very hard to police but good feature sets can help people mitigate this.
mary

Mary

Thank you very much for that thoughtful response. Regarding power and power grabs, it's like what you said the other day to the woman who tweeted at you about using twitter to "rank" people - your response about the desire of some to "steal power back" from those they perceive as holding power over them was especially insightful of the complexity of power - particularly in terms of the way power is internalised and processed. And you're quite correct that our perception and awareness of power mediated relationships occurs on a much more discreet level that we may not be in a position to talk about openly, which is why some of us need granularity in our personal boundaries - as we have throughout human socialisation.

WC,

Re; walled/unwalled spaces, you certainly have a point but I think the issue for me is "social content" versus other kinds of content.

With social content tied to social networks there are new issues of disclosure that are not necessarily appropriate subjects of "transparency." For example, who are friends are. I'm not sure any of us should be held to be "transparent" about our personal associations. That's the part I'm wrestling with here. Is that there may be some very important limits to this concept.

If you watch the doctorow video I linked to above he talks about the limits of the logic of "transparency" in an age of surveillance and abuses of public liberties. If we were all operating according to such standards - including those who mine and expoit all our personal data - then I'd be more comfortable with that paradigm. Again, not sharing with *everyone* is not the same as hiding, being secret or not being accountable.

You know, if you think these issues of privacy are complicated for us, imagine trying to explain them to my tween children. Not an easy task.

No kidding, Jeff. And this younger generation are saturated in corporate media culture of gossip, celebrity and bullying (from what I hear from my high school teacher friends). Many teens have little sense or concept of privacy as we think of it (at least, according to the Pew study!) :)

Your comments, Melanie, resound for me too. As you know, however, I have assumed my anonymous handle, not giving out my name. Why? For the same reasons you point out below.

"Two points I left out above:

1) being a woman online presents different kinds of safety issues.

2) being a teacher online presents different kinds of boundary issues."

The triple identity I have on Twitter (2 academic for university-level courses) and iVenus give me a sense of security, at least for the time being. Of course, then another issue arises: people don't know my name so they can't learn too much more about the person behind the avatar/handle. If someone really wanted to, however, I suppose they could connect the dots quite easily.

While I don't share your same concerns I'm so glad you articulated your position. Your thoughtful decision is very compelling but more than that, you must respect someone who makes a choice after understanding all the variables.

It reminds me of friends who chose to put their students in a private Christian school. My beef with that decision was because I felt they were doing it for the wrong and possibly uniformed reasons. They were claiming the public schools were in some kind of conspiracy to undermine Christian values. As someone who works for public education I simply knew that to be false. Other friends had their students in that school because they wanted their kids to have a Christian education. That made sense to me.

Thanks for explaining your position.

People who usually believe they have so much to hide usually are the less interesting to follow.

They just don't add that much and are generally (hugely) more closed to anything new.

Plus, you can't mashup anything they publish, nor search for it, nor reply or talk to. It's just not net nor inter nor social nor anything.

Also, they spend a lot of energy trying to hide whatever they are or write properly, believing they are somehow more valuable and not rarely guessing they know more how to behave on social networks then the open people. I'm sorry, I respect the people who choose walled updates and even more the services who offer that basic fundamental choice (because there are people who really need it and that's the freedom of choice way of doing it), but the open people are the soul of anything social on the Internet and out of it.

It's true that openness is the grease that makes this machine run. But
too much grease... oh, block that metaphor! In any case, even on the
web we're still human beings, and one of our fundamental rights should
be control over our discourse. Giving it away to be mashed up, etc. is
one of these rights; it's what gives digital communications as they've
emerged such power. But it's a right our tech should empower us to
exercise as we see fit, not compel us to observe automatically.
Otherwise, it's not much of a right!

I don't like Louis's tone, but I wouldn't entirely dismiss his point. For example, this blog would be a lot less interesting and valuable to the world if it weren't publicly accessible. In general, social media (which include the web as a whole) thrive on collective public participation.

But I fundamentally agree with Melanie that everything we do in public is a choice--and hopefully a conscious one. My professional life is largely public, but much of my personal life is not. Within both spheres, I consciously decide what to make public and how to present it. I would feel violated if the expectations I'd built around those decisions were not respected. And I imagine that most people feel the same way.

I do think there is social value to moving more of our lives into the public sphere. The individual right to privacy can have a social cost--which is why we see the vigilantism of outing people in the name of collective good. I'm libertarian enough not to give up my choices about privacy in the name of public good. But I can see the other side of the argument.

The public value of our openness is predicated precisely on the power
we have to control our participation. I think it's easy for us to
forget this on the web, many pieces of which Cory Doctorow brilliantly
describes as Skinner boxes designed to reward us for giving up
information. Remember, Melanie protects her tweets in the context of
putting lots of info into the public stream, as in this
searchable-and-findable discourse. It's not like saying *no*
altogether and switching off the machines. If we start to demand full
disclosure as the price of participation, we may be on an ugly
Orwellian path.

Orwellian path, indeed.

The public value of our openness is predicated precisely on what we open IN FACT and not in theory. To be completely open in a completely closed environment is valid and useful but is hardly social, searchable, findable, linkable, mashable or world wide web at all.

As long as we're discussing Twitter walled posts and not this blog, Melaine's protected updates are NOT searchable-and-findable discourse. Quite unfair that you put the other way. But you can see that here, in this open environment (even with Melaine's ability to moderate it), we can have a open findable-and-searchable discussion, the kind where people as myself can discover Melaine's wisdom and link to her and openly talk to, even if I'm not in her closed environment of friends.

And you don't have to full disclosure anything. Nor bring Orwell and make a terror out of it to justify the need of privacy or control. You don't know my e-mail or my personal profile, for example. And I don't need to know yours or Melaine's. We still have the control over our information while talking to each other and making the web valuable to us -- or, in other others, making it meaningful and powerful to enter the Skinner box and giving away our words and beliefs.

That's exactly the point: this is not about personal profile, but the TALK per se. Walled updates block the talk. As if this blog had no comments or if Melaine's posts were private. Curiously, as someone well put it in an earlier comment, Melaine cannot fully control all the aspects of the nature of her connections or all information is going out in her walled updates because her open friends may talk and comment about it in their unwalled updates. The best form you have to control your participation is controlling your own updates (which would be much more secure) while protecting (!) the talk.

> As long as we're discussing Twitter walled posts and not this blog,
> Melaine's protected updates are NOT searchable-and-findable discourse. Quite
> unfair that you put the other way. But you can see that here, in this open
 
I was referring to this forum, NOT Twitter. Apologies if that wasn't clear.
 
Here's the question: would you compel everyone who uses Twitter to
keep their posts open? It's certainly possibly to do so, just as it's
possible to limit tweets to 89 character or 173 instead of 140. But
the folks who came up with the tool included a provision to protect
Tweets if users wanted to do so. Why did they do this? I'm not up to
speed on the history of the medium, but I'd guess that they imagined
people would want to use Twitter in all kinds of ways. As I said in an
earlier post, I think the ideal formula would include a checkbox next
to the update button that says "make this post a feed." We should have
the right to control our discourse. People should be able to use
Twitter-like tools in intranets and darknets if they so choose. Let
the instantiations flourish!
 
I think we agree that open information is a public good. But I think
that openness is served by a proliferation of the tools we have to
modulate and control our own information.

My twitters are not private (yet) but I find it interesting that some of the wisest people I follow have required a request. I have been wondering what that is all about.

I think of Twitter as a cocktail party but maybe it is Big Brother on Reality TV.

Personally, what am I prepared to give up in order to achieve something? This is about fully understanding the scope and consequences of our choices. Twitter is often just information (don't get me wrong I love information) but it isn't automatically wisdom. Thank you. This is a wise post.

This is the blog post I've been trying to write myself explaining to all the people who sometimes actually seem almost angry that I protect my updates on Twitter. Yep, we have nothing to hide at all but we protect our updates because... well... you have said it all. Great posting and I'm more than happy to direct people to this posting of yours whenever people ask me why I protect my updates.

I agree with Louis in many aspects - the only reason I protect my updates for stretches at a time is to simply unplug from the public, but in a week I get back on.

I believe wholeheatedly that protecting updates sort of negates the whole point of being a social network. One is, in fact, being unsocial when they create the private veil. It becomes a "what's the point?" sort of phenomenon and one may as well simply not be on Twitter and confine discussions with interested parties to email threads about a topic.

Or, better yet, such a user is probably best suited to having a blog where they can control the comment flow. Since blogs are not the ample microcosms of aggregate thoughts and goings on that a network like Twitter is. In short, as rude as this will seem, if you choose to protect your updates, do the web a favor and delete your account so others can have the username.

Yes, I am advocating that there is a right way to use Twitter. Shocking, yes, since I am protecting my updates currently as part of an unplugging ritual I go through. So I am not using it right at this juncture. If you protect your updates all the time I am aware you have nothing to hide, but I am more inclined to think you are simply not interesting enough to follow. If you would rather only talk to your key friends, there are other sites for that.

Agree for the most part. Just want to clarify that Facebook started with security and has given options recently (in beta still) for global sharing. So, i think they have gone about it the right way.

Twitter, for most people, is just a chat client. Would you want all of your instant messaging conversations exposed to search engines?

Wrote a blog last week on this very subject - about blowing up twitter and starting over.

http://www.notwillsmith.com/technology/blowup-twitter-start-over/