According to GlobalPOV’s write up of a Zogby poll, privacy is for geezers; young net users conceptualize privacy differently than do older net users.

Evidence of this? According to the poll, “Only 19.6 percent of 18-24 year-olds consider their dating profile to be an invasion of their privacy, compared to 54.6 percent of other respondents.”

Are these different definitions of privacy significant? GlobalPOV thinks so, since these young people will one day be effecting policy decisions about web use & privacy.

What I find more notable is the pleasure(s) that young people & Web 2.0 users in general derive from online self-disclosure. A profile on a social networking sites (think MySpace or Facebook) is largely an accumulation of lists: favorite music, books, television shows, music. Blogs may not be as self-indulgent as some media gatekeepers claim, but blogs, especially as they’re situated in the larger blogosphere, generally involve some disclosure of & community building around shared interests & concerns. &, of course, blogs that function as online diaries are bound to mention the brand-name products that bloggers’ everyday rituals involve.

Apparently, there is enough discussion of companies & products in blogs to justify the existence of Cymfony. Cymfony (located in nearby Watertown, MA) is a service that other companies can use to “mine” blogs for discussions of their products & services. In a way, it provides a Nielsen ratings for blogs; a company that uses Cymfony’s services can find out what its “market share” of blogs is, in addition to the “top attributes” bloggers associate with its product or service.

The language that Cymfony & those who celebrate it use is telling. Cymfony’s homepage cheerily proclaims that the company is “harnessing influence 2.0.” A July/August 2005 RFL Communications, Inc. publication opens

“The rise of so-called ‘consumer-generated media’ online (e.g., blogs, chat rooms, etc.) has turned the Internet into something of a giant, free-wheeling focus group–and multiple research providers have cropped up to help marketers tap into the unprecedented wealth of insights.”

It used to be that marketers had to compensate consumers to participate in focus groups. It used to be that marketers had to solicit us for the information about our consumptive habits. Or, they could acquire it surreptitiously - by tracking our Web clicks & searches, for example.

In Everyday Surveillance, Willam G. Staples writes that the secretive-ish going-ons of market research on the Internet

“helps companies ritualize knowledge-gathering activities that build case files out of the smallest, mundane details of our lives, often without us even knowing about them. By increasing the amount of information they have about us, and by decreasing the amount of control we have over that information, private companies shift the balance of power in their favor. W e are thus vulnerable to being ‘targeted’ for marketing campaigns that bring all the ‘intelligence’ gathered about us together with the power of the human sciences in an attempt to shape and influence our choices, behaviors, and social and cultural activities.” (2000:148)

What is peculiar now is that we’re voluntarily giving up the information that marketers want without them asking for it. & we’re enjoying giving it up, finding the experience of creating & managing an online self pleasurable. & we’re creating our online social networks around the very data that market researchers desire. (I won’t go so far as to say that Web 2.0 users are manufacturing their own manipulation (& having a ball doing so), but that does seem like one implication.)

At least Web 2.0 is killing off spying; no one needs stealth strategies if we like publishing & publicizing what they want to know in the first place.

EP