No more secrets?

The future belongs to the uninhibited says New York Magazine's Emily Nussbaum in one of the best articles I've seen yet on the net generation gap, 'Say Everything'. As younger people reveal their private lives on the Internet, the older generation looks on with alarm and misapprehension not seen since the early days of rock and roll." Take a look at the most popular New Zealand websites, measured by Hitwise (aside from asserting Google's dominance, Bebo registers as the sixth most popular site, ahead of the New Zealand Herald, Yahoo! YouTube and MSN and all without a marketing budget. I doubt there are too many registered kiwi Bebo users over 30). Anyway, Nassbaum identifies three significant changes that denote a generation of mostly young people who eagerly chronicle their lives online. They are: they think of themselves as having an audience; they have archived their adolescence; and their skin is thicker than yours. When one subject is asked how she will feel about the document she's created when she's 35, she responds: “I’ll be proud! ... It’s a documentation of my youth, in a way. Even if it’s just me, going back and Googling myself in 25 or 30 years. It’s my self—what I used to be, what I used to do.”

And then there's this from Wired Magazine's Clive Thompson on the 'Naked CEO', an essay on the rise of corporate blogging. Following the Radical Transparency theme, he notes that 'you can't hide anything anymore' (quoting the Naked Corporation) and later 'secrecy is dying, it's probably already dead'; to which his reader community responded: 'It's not secrets that are dying ... but lies.' The point: transparency can be good business, but you've got to be sincere. "Executives who promise they'll be open have to stay open. The minute they become evasive about troubling news, transparency's implied social compact crumbles." And of course, the Google-net is the new arbiter of authority, the place where reputations are made an lost, creating an incentive to be open and yes, transparent.

So, the line between public and private is blurring at both ends. Reading The Hollow Men recently, it seems to me that a new line has been clearly drawn, for the moment at least. If anything, the leaking of the National Party's emails on such a scale served notice that there are no more secrets, while bloggers ensure that secrets are exposed to perspective and context outside the framework of the mainstream media. The reputation economy made its point. Google 'Don Brash' or read his Wiki and make your own judgement. His reputation defined by Google search indefinitely. John Key has taken note and is making visible attempts to be open and transparent. But I'd suggest he take note of Thompson's closing remarks: "The future could be a brushed-chrome machine made of truth and honesty - or some gothic nightmare in which the whole economy is driven by gossipy high school dynamics. Either way, there's no use trying to resist. You're already naked."

PS. I've corrected a couple of typos above. Eek. If you're interested in the idea of corporate blogging, check out Chris Bell's guide, 'Blog Safe' in this month's Unlimited (not yet online).