Privacy is on its way out - I wonder if anyone will miss it

Much has been written about "the death of privacy" - and I think a lot of it has been over-stated. But I do think it's true that the world is a much less private place than it used to be. Whether you're looking at the information that people choose to share on social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Myspace- or previously-hidden (or, at least, hard to reach) information that's now in the public domain (such as estimated home values on Zillow), there are a lot of things that were previously private that are no longer so.

And that's largely OK with me. On the whole, I'm not really too fussed what people know about me or my life. I've always felt there's a fine line between privacy and secrecy - with the former being generally a good thing that helps people have and maintain appropriate inter-personal boundaries and the latter being an unhelpful, controlling and ultimately destructive impulse that is as unhealthy in personal relationships as it is in governments.

The real question that I think technology has brought to us is this: who gets to decide what's private and what's not? Hopefully, each of us gets to make our own decisions on that, but it doesn't always seem to work out that way.

There are some things that clearly fall within the existing legal framework - such as the big "cellphone hacking" scandal in the UK where a major tabloid newspaper is accused of sanctioning the hacking of cellphone messages and texts between the rich, royal and famous. And then there are a lot of gray areas.

Suppose, for example, that I didn't want Zillow to publish an estimated value for my house? Or that I didn't want Google to offer a "street view" of that house? Or maybe that I didn't want every search engine on the planet to pull up links to my older, published work (the good, the bad and the ugly).

For the most part, I'd be out of luck. I have a reasonable expectation of privacy around what I say in-person to someone else (and I can judge for myself whether that person is likely to pass on information that I have told them is private). I should also have a similar expectation for cellphone messages and texts - although it's clear that they can be hacked. But published work on the Web - whether it's newspaper, magazine articles or video - that's all fair game.

The long and short of all this, I think, is that we're all just going to have to get used to a lot less privacy and be OK with that. I don't see any way to turn back the tide - nor a huge amount of value in doing so. Sure, there are a lot of things that ideally should go with that (like a greater sense of tolerance and acceptance throughout society for people's backgrounds, political views and other things they might have otherwise wanted to keep private), but changes to expected levels of privacy will happen regardless of those broader societal changes. And there do have to be some hard lines drawn.

While I don't mind - on the whole - much of my life being open, I think kids, for example, should be protected from having their young lives impacted by this lack of privacy before they're learned how to manage it. And some of that will come from education (so that they know how to use privacy settings on Facebook and Myspace) and some of it may have to come from legislation.

In general, my hope is that reduced levels of privacy will cause more of us - with our human frailties and foibles - to be regarded by our fellow citizens as "just regular folks" who deserve our consideration and acceptance. I honestly believe that the more we look at others as people - first and foremost - the less we'll suffer from the impact of less privacy.

What do you think? Don't feel that you need to keep your thoughts private!

My Memory is Online

I feel fortunate that the digitization of my life seems to be happening at a point when my own brain is straining to retain (and retrieve) all the information I think it is supposed to hold. Having lived my professional life as a writer - and much of my work having appeared online for the last 15 years - I'm finding that the Web is actually doing a pretty good job of remembering things for me that I had almost forgotten.

I like to think of memories as being kind of like that big warehouse at the end of the "Raiders of the Lost Ark" movie, where there's a seemingly endless array of boxes containing historical artifacts - most of them gathering dust and all difficult to identify and unpack in any rational way.

What is surprising to me now is just how many pieces of my "pre-Web" life are appearing on the Web (and spark retrieval of those things I haven't thought about in a long time). I would not have expected, for example, that the writing that I did in my university student newspaper days would ever make it to the Web. And yet, through the magic of archived PDFs, my writing (and that of many of my friends) appears on the University of British Columbia's library archive site. In this example, on Page 5, I see a piece that my old friend Tom Hawthorn wrote about exploitation of students working at a certain large burger chain, On Page 6, there's a piece by Bill Tieleman on the efforts by the New Democratic Party to rebuild itself (shades of today) and, on Page 9, I am reminded that I actually did write an extensive feature about the perils of being a parent and living in student housing. And all of this took place in this week 31 years ago!  

Meanwhile, the Web also holds the text of long-forgotten technology articles. This piece unearths work that I did in writing about how the early Apple Macintosh was used to help Fleetwood Mac's road manager handle the band's 1988 European tour. If you had asked me to remember anything about writing that article, I would have been hard-pressed to do so. In fact, I had completely forgotten having written it until I saw that piece while doing a search for this post.

Come the 1990s and things get a little easier. But many old Web sites have been taken down or radically altered. So as an aid to my memory, I sometimes use the "Wayback Machine", which provides archives of some pages of old Web sites - even if the sites themselves are long gone. You just stick in the URL of the old site and it will bring back a list of pages it has archived from now defunct sites - organized by day.

Of course, none of this is really a substitute for actually remembering things. And I'll try to remember that.

Why I Don't Want To Be My Own Editer

It's an odd feeling to know that you're becoming irrelevant. But that was indeed how I felt after giving a talk at a local university about my life as a writer - and trying to give tips to young, aspiring writers.

The core of this irrelevance was simply that the kinds of challenges and aspirations facing young writers has changed. For centuries - virtually since the invention of the printing press - one of the biggest obstacles for any writer was to get published. Sure, there were a few hardy souls who wrote for the love of writing. But the most prolific (think Charles Dickens or Arthur Conan Doyle or, more latterly, Stephen King) were all about getting their work published and in front of large numbers of readers. And, of course, they wanted to get paid so they could make a living doing what they loved.

Now, anyone with Internet access and a free account on Blogger, can be a published online writer. And if you want to write a book, Amazon makes it pretty easy and economic to self-publish - and sell - Kindle versions of your work (at a minimal cost and, of course, agreeing to share revenue with Amazon). The part about getting paid, however, is a little more tricky in this new world. You need to handle that yourself - by getting advertising on your blog, selling eBooks directly - or be one of those rare bloggers whose work makes it from the blog to the big screen (hello, Julie and Julia).

But the real point is that writers no longer have to live and die professionally by the whims of editors and publishers - even if they are willing to be 'starving artists'. And I'm not totally convinced that's a good thing. Editors and publishers (good ones, anyway) can add a great deal to the quality and value of any written work - from magazine article to grand historical novel. Left to handle everything on their own, today's new writers have to be their own editors and publishers.

The smart ones will, I think, seek out others to fulfill that role for them. It's very hard to edit your own work - and even harder to be a judge of its appeal to readers. Being your own publisher means having to set your own quality bar. I, for example, have to tell myself (not always successfully) that readers may not enjoy having sentences constantly broken up by dashes, parentheses and odd asides within the narrative. But I'm my own publisher and editor, so who's going to stop me?

The answer seems to be that I'm going to have to stop myself. And that's hard. But maybe it's a better challenge than having to pester editors and publishers with my ideas until I find one that appeals to them. I personally don't think so.

What do you think?