The Glocal Village

A recent somewhat shocking experience with the Web 2.0, in which I really lost control of my image (fortunately, the content isn't damaging for my reputation, but still) has inspired me the following thoughts. I'm posting them today as I was invited to a seminar by Dynamia about the safety of one's digital personal data (in French only), which was temporarily postponed. But I hope this can serve as a starting point for deeper reflexions that could be elaborated on in such gathering.

The metaphor of the "Global Village" has now been offering for more than 40 years a vision of a sort of "flat world", with no barriers, where people can meet peacefully and communicate seamlessly. Based on an idealistic conception of the village community (I live in a village, so I know what I'm talking about), this expression tends to completely oversee some less charming aspects of this way of life. Among them, I'd like to particularly point community's gaze, gossips, neighbor's malevolence. Moreover, the adjective "global", while giving us the illusion of being connected to the rest of world, makes us then forget that we are unfortunately first and foremost rooted in the local, made of family, friends, colleagues or fellow students. This results in us loosing some sense of discretion if not decency when we are active online. And I'm not talking about puritanism or prudishness here, but about protecting one's personal sphere.

However imperfect, this metaphor still grasps one reality of the Internet, and especially the so-called Web 2.0, that users tend to forget if not to outright ignore. That one's digital existence is simply an extension of one's actual daily life in the physical world. But it seems that the shielding effect of the screen, often along with a lack of understanding of the way the Internet actually works, makes a huge number of people oblivious to this, and leaves a lot of younger ones simply unaware of it. With the result that people end up publishing things they would never think of saying in the non-digital public space.

Although, as illustrated by the recent awareness of the use of the Web by pedophiles to get in touch with their victims and even kidnap them or the spree of identity thefts, especially in the US, the problems linked to one's participation in the global digital babbles can come from far away, there are even more chances that they will come from round the corner. That's what I would call the "village effect". Stories are beginning to abound about people using the Web to get revenge from colleagues, by opening up a blog in their stead and spreading slanders about their colleagues, teenagers harassing their classmates on MySpace or other "social platforms", people spying on their neighbors, family relatives blackmailing each others by digging out more easily than ever old stories thanks to Google,… Of course, avoiding making enemies in your daily life is probably the best way to prevent this kind of nasty backlash, but as universal popularity isn't either a realistic aim, this is why it seems to me that we would need some of the old recipes that our parents, who were raised in an internet- and even computer-free environment, learned as basics to roam through life: discretion about one's private life, a certain amount of wariness in front of the new (no, I'm not talking of paranoia or racism here), and a general self-restraint before starting to open up accounts on all the latest hyped social platforms.

So paradoxically, I feel that our parents, who might be much less computer- or Internet-savy than many of us younger generations, are better equipped to explore the digital sea and become actors of the new online social platforms than we, who have grown-up in the 1980's-1990's surrounded by media and industries advocating self-exhibitionism and 15-minutes stardom as almost a duty.