I hijacked Dardove's topic to jaw about this, but it deserves its own thread.
More and more, I've been thinking it's a virtue to eschew privacy, or at least some kinds of it. See, why do we want privacy? There can be practical value to it, but a lot of the time, I think, we're ashamed of what we're trying to hide. And shame can be at least partly legitimate. One might be ashamed of alcoholism, for example, because one knows how pernicious it is. One can avoid shame by avoiding publicity, but when the shame is legitimate—when we really think we shouldn't do the thing what we're ashamed about—then a more reasonable response is to try to change that very behavior. And perhaps keeping ourselves in a public light can shame us into changing our behavior, or into ensuring our behavior is justifiable to begin with.
I was thinking along these lines when I began using "Kodiologist" as a username (on GameFAQs, and, later, elsewhere). I like to think that keeping my online identity closely tied to my meatspace identity (I even have an index: http://arfer.net/elsewhere ) has made me more careful, in a useful way, about what I say online. Another means of living publicly that I've just begun to try out is open-notebook science. Open-notebook science takes the idea of open science, which is to freely provide all data and code one produces in the course of doing research (as opposed to just publishing a paper), and takes it another step further: the scientist releases his personal notes, preferably in real time. (You can see that open science is, in turn, a natural extension of the free-software philosophy.) I have three notebooks online right now, although they're not linked to from my projects page, and I haven't released the raw data (yet):
http://arfer.net/projects/builder/notebook
http://arfer.net/projects/authority/notebook
http://arfer.net/projects/hazard/notebook
I see the primary potential benefit of open-notebook science not as shaming myself into doing better science so much as communication. Of course, the various potential benefits of living publicly—motivation to behave better, transparency, accountability, honesty, and communication—are interrelated.
Living publicly is not to be confused with social networking. Tweeting what you had for lunch is more trouble than it's worth, for both the writer and the reader. Ideally, living publicly should have less to do with going out of your way to tell people about things and more with not hiding what you're doing—with revealing the man behind the curtain.
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"Generally the plan was to get away from government and allow the natural virtue of man to assert itself. What more can you ask for as an explanation of failure?" —B. F. Skinner (as Frazier in Walden Two)
If I get what you're saying, you mean that by attaching our actual names to our online personas will cause a reduction of the stupidity of things such as Youtube comments, and the like (coming a bit of what you say in this and the other topic).
Except Youtube (and Bungee) have done just that...and it changed nothing...
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Well, there is a new accent of n00b language. It's called: Vet LUEser goes Foreign!-MegaSpy22
Those must be the pants of the gods!-Digitalpython
YouTube profiles seem pseudonymous to me (arbitrary example: http://www.youtube.com/user/Babyma ). By "Bungee", do you mean some official Bungie forum?
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"Generally the plan was to get away from government and allow the natural virtue of man to assert itself. What more can you ask for as an explanation of failure?" —B. F. Skinner (as Frazier in Walden Two)
...Yeah that's what I meant by "Bungee"...
...I'm not a very good speller...
And youtube has been bugging me to start using my real name lately, since it syncs up with Gmail automatically...
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Well, there is a new accent of n00b language. It's called: Vet LUEser goes Foreign!-MegaSpy22
Those must be the pants of the gods!-Digitalpython
Oh yeah, I vaguely remember reading a post on Reddit complaining about that. The submitter was all "No way do I want to use my real name on YouTube." So I guess that supports my thesis?
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"Generally the plan was to get away from government and allow the natural virtue of man to assert itself. What more can you ask for as an explanation of failure?" —B. F. Skinner (as Frazier in Walden Two)