Inspired by m’learned friend John Brown‘s post on the Chatroulette craze (here),  I  thought here and now was a good time to talk about a somewhat contentious trend: Sharing. More specifically, with the internet in the middle, where does our privacy end and the public (and, by inference,  publicity) begin?

There’s a good summary of differences in generational attitude to privacy by David Aaronovitch here, but the argument boils down to this. Some people think social networking encourages us a kind of social pornography, where we let everything hang out to such an extent that they lay bare our relationships, financial and professional lives to anyone who cares to look. This, they say, is a bad thing.

Those on the other side, take a more pragmatic view given that it’s pretty unlikely that the social media genie will go back in the bottle now.  They contend that if you’ve grown up to live your life with an audience, it’s normal and we should just get on with it. After all, plenty of ideas about our society that we now take for granted as unambiguously good – for example, democracy or the abolition of slavery – were once thought daring or downright immoral. Why should sharing your life with the internet be any different over the long-term?

So far so black and white. As usual, however, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. And take a deep breath now, because here comes the history.

The argument that the kind of communal life we can now live online via Facebook, Twitter et al is an unprecendented shift for human interaction is total bunk. Humans have lived within tight-knit communities that watched one another, shared stuff with one another and (more on why this is important below) judged one another’s actions since before we came down from the trees. The 19th and 20th centuries may have splintered those kind of bonds by physically breaking up geographical communities, but geographically neutral social media can help restore them.

The ‘campaigning’ spirit we also see on social networks – for the NHS or against everyone from Trafigura to Jan Moir – is also a sign that this kind of communication encourages people to think of morality as being a collective rather than individual concept. Again, this is a very old notion, dating back to pre-Reformation Europe, when a ‘good’ or ‘godly’ person was someone who did good deeds rather than think good thoughts, which was where the Protestants parted company with Catholics.

So it’s an old argument. Am I ‘myself’ what I think I am, or am I happy to be what my network (or community) sees? And if my conception of myself comes partly from other people, is it possible for privacy to exist?

But what relevance does all this have to Chatroulette?

More than you’d think. I’d say that Chatroulette is the exception that proves the rule about online communities. Because it isn’t one. Functional communities are self-regulating. They set rules, whether these are spoken or unspoken, and people who transgress those are punished by social exclusion. I don’t sleep with my brother’s wife because I value my relationship with my brother. And I don’t make racist comments on Twitter because I know these would insult my followers and I value their respect. As humans we’re attuned to set boundaries for sharing what is appropriate.

Chatroulette is different. It doesn’t matter whether what you do on it is polite, rude or downright offensive because it’s a random interaction that has little chance of getting back to your own network. There’s no punishment for not playing nice, so many people don’t.To purloin a hackneyed phrase: “what happens on Chatroulette, stays on Chatroulette”.

Privacy, like time and space, is relative. And we’ve had millions of years to deal with that.