The battle that is underway is not a battle over the future of privacy and publicity. It’s a battle over choice and informed consent. It’s unfolding because people are being duped, tricked, coerced, and confused into doing things where they don’t understand the consequences. Facebook keeps saying that it gives users choices, but that is completely unfair. It gives users the illusion of choice and hides the details away from them “for their own good.”

I’m going to go sit in the corner and swoon over danah boyd’s brilliance while you all go read her latest post Facebook and “radical transparency” (a rant).

In a country where about one-third of the population regularly goes online, the internet gives women “a place to vent out our frustrations and our dreams,“ said Reem Asaad, 37, a professor of banking and finance in the Saudi port city of Jeddah who blogs at reemasaad.blogspot.com.

This reminds me of danah boyd‘s research into teenagers’s use of social sites such as Facebook and MySpace. She has suggested teens use these sites for identity formation and community connection in the way they used to do in malls, parking lots and other public spaces that we’ve collectively chased them out of. Given Saudi Arabia’s severe restrictions on women in public spaces, I think a similar phenomenon is happening here.

On the one hand, the ghetto is a part of a city historically defined by race and class. On the other hand, being ghetto refers to a set of tastes that emerged as poor people of color developed fashion and cultural artifacts that proudly expressed their identity. Just as physical spaces and tastes are organized around and shaped by race and class, so too are digital environments.

From “White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook” by danah boyd. [Draft; PDF file]

By and large, those who are looking are those who hold power over the person being observed. Parents look. Teachers look. Employers look. Governments look. Corporations look. These people are often looking to judge or manipulate. Given the powerful position they are in, those doing the looking often think that they have the right to look. The excuse is simple: “it’s public.” But do they have the right to judge? The right to manipulate? This, of course, is the essence of conversations about surveillance. And so we argue and argue and argue about the right to privacy in public spaces.

From danah boyd‘s “Do you See What I See?: Visibility of Practices through Social Media”.

Also see: My earlier posts Ethics, friendships and Flickr and Twitter, privacy, and informational self-determination.

So I have a favor to ask … I am going to be giving a bunch of public speaking performances at web conferences in the next couple of months: Supernova and Le Web in December, SXSW in March, WWW in April. I will do my darndest to give new, thought-provoking talks that will leave your brain buzzing. I will try really really hard to speak slowly. But in return, please come with some respect. Please treat me like a person, not an object. Come to talk with me, not about me. I’m ready and willing to listen, but I need you to be as well. And if you don’t want to listen, fine, don’t. But please don’t distract your neighbors with crude remarks. Let’s make public speaking and public listening an art form. Maybe that’s too much to ask for, but really, I need to feel like it’s worth it again.

One of the things that rankles me most is when people behave like assholes when it’s unwarranted. A big part of why I don’t do panels anymore is because I’m not okay with being ridiculed. I sincerely hope danah continues to speak at conferences and similar events. And I hope that people — and sadly, it’s usually men — stop being shameless dickwads.

As networked technologies proliferate around the world, we can assume that there is a channel of distribution available to everyone and between everyone. In theory, anyone could get content to anyone else. With the barriers to distribution collapsing, what matters is not the act of distribution, but the act of consumption. Thus, the power is no longer in the hands of those who control the channels of distribution, but those who control the limited resource of attention. This is precisely why YOU were the Person of the Year. Your attention is precious and valuable. It’s no longer about push; it’s about pull. And the law of two feet is now culturally pervasive.

Yeah, we know that and live that, right? But danah explains why and how this current Web2.0 wave is different from the early adopter wave/