Publicness
Discussion
Arguments in favour of publicness
Jeff Jarvis "on the value you get from being public, the value that also accrues to groups, companies, government, and society as a whole:
- Publicness makes and improves relationships. To make connections with people, you need to be open and share. When you decide not to be public, you risk losing that connection.
- Publicness enables collaboration. That’s the beta lesson: When you open up your process, you invite people to help you improve what you’re doing. It is also, of course, the lesson of open-source.
- Publicness builds trust. Secrecy doesn’t.
- Publicness kills the myth of perfection. That is, when we open our process, we are showing our faults and are no longer held at every moment to the myth of perfection that has come to rule our industrial-age processes.
- Publicness disarms taboos. Publicness was the daring weapon gays and lesbians used to tear down their closets. I’m not saying that people should be forced out of their closets; that is their choice. But I am saying that when they do, it faces down the bigots who made homosexuality a taboo; it disarms them.
- Publicness grants immortality. (Note to Andrew Keen: That’s a joke.) Publicness at least grants credit and provides provenance for ideas and creation.
- Publicness enables the wisdom of the crowd. If we all keep our information, knowledge, ideas, and lessons to ourselves, we lose collectively.
- Publicness organizes us. Cue Clay Shirky. Speaking and assembling go hand-in-hand as rights. When we stand up and say who we are, we can find others like us and do things together.
- Publicness protects. This will be controversial but the knowledge that one’s actions could be public have an impact. That’s why I’m not against cameras on Times Square to thwart the next bomber.
- Publicness is value. This is an argument I’ll make that what’s public is owned by the public — whether that’s governments’ actions or images taken in public space — and whenever that is diminished, it robs from us, the public."
(http://www.buzzmachine.com/2010/09/26/the-benefits-of-publicness/)
The Impact of Publicness on Privacy
= Once-abundant privacy is now scarce. Once-scarce publicness is now abundant.
Jeff Jarvis:
"The economics of abundant publicness mean that the old gatekeepers -- editors, agents, producers, publishers, broadcasters, the entire media industry -- overnight lost their power. That's why they're so upset. That's why they keep complaining about all these amateurs taking over their sacred turf -- because they are. What they thought was valuable -- their control -- now had no value. They can't sell their casting couches and presses on craigslist for nothin'. They are being beat by those who break up their control and hand it out for free (Google, craigslist, Facebook, YouTube, etc.).
Abundant publicness also creates new value. Google search is made up of that value. Twitter movie chatter predicting box-office success is that value. Annotations on maps, restaurant reviews, health trends, customer desires -- and on and on -- all find value in our publicness and so new companies are being built on that value. That is why it is in the interests of both companies and customers to be public and why privacy -- when it does compete, when it discourages publicness -- becomes a nuisance for them." (http://www.buzzmachine.com/2010/08/05/the-price-of-privacy/)
More Information
Upcoming book by Jeff Jarvis "about the end of privacy and the benefits of publicness", entitled Public Parts, announced via http://www.buzzmachine.com/2010/05/20/public-parts/
See also: