A Social Network that Gives Control over Our Own Digital Life – Past, Present, and Future

Image: jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Friendster was the first social network that I joined. A friend of mine invited me to that social network and then I signed up. I found it very interesting that I could make contact with friends, including the ones I did not often see physically. But, if it is only about making contacts, then why not using emails or phone texting? There is something different. And I believe it is the exposure. I like my friends to know what I do, what I think, who my friends are, what my other friends think about me, and so on. On the other way around, I like to find out things about other people, too. But, is that worth it?

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Following the success of Friendster, there were many more social networks created. Many invitations came to my mailbox from my friends to join various social networks. I did accept some of those invitations for some reasons. One, it was such a trend and I wanted to be a part of it. Two, I wanted to appreciate my friend’s invitation. And three, I did get fun and some benefits using Friendster, so why not give these a try as well?

To make the story short, I ended up as a user of Multiply, Myspace, hi5, Yahoo360°, LinkedIn, and probably some others that I cannot even name now. I have closed my accounts on some networks and abandoned some others without any idea if I can still access them now. The main reason of leaving those networks was (again) to follow the trend. New networks came alive and my friends started using them, so I had to move, too. Today, I am a user of Facebook, Twitter, Plurk, Flickr, Goodreads, and Foursquare. Aside from these networks, I also have accounts in WordPress, Picasa, and Youtube.

But, do I really need to use all those social networks? That is a tough question. I can say each one of them has their own specialties and purposes. And once I use them, it is hard to leave them because I have history or things that I posted there. They are parts of my digital life and I do not want to lose them.

The best that I can do right now is to avoid joining other networks because I do not want to make my digital life more scattered to those networks. It is already too scattered now. However, I believe there will be more and more social networks coming and offering new things. And like traps in a jungle, I might end up using one or two of them in the future, making my digital life more scattered.

I see this as a big problem. I mentioned that I like the exposure, so I share my data, my contacts, my pictures and my opinions. But now, I realised that they are parts of my identity in the digital life. And I have put them deliberately in various different networks, some of them I cannot even access anymore. This means I have lost control over parts of my digital life – my life!

I have probably posted something valuable that I do not know where it is anymore. Someone else may use it for their own benefits without my consent. Or probably I have posted something inappropriate that I thought was fun, but can be used against me in the future.

Therefore, I need something to collect all pieces of my digital life from the past so I can use them to complete the figure my present digital life. With this, I can build my future digital life with my own full control. I am thinking about my dream social network that can give this control to me. Think about a box that can absorb all things that I have ever posted by providing my email accounts. Then, there will be a dashboard showing all these data collected from the networks. At this point, I get three options: publish, retain, or remove. Publish means I share the information to selected contacts. Retain means I keep the information to myself. And remove means I delete the data both from my box and from the original social networks.

This will be a lucky day for me because I can get all my digital life back in one social network, so I can delete my other accounts in other social networks. My digital life will not be scattered anymore.

So, how can this work? Besides collecting the data from other networks, this new social network has to maintain users’ contacts and existing communication as well. Other than that, this social network has to give the same feelings as when the users feel when using the previous networks. Otherwise, it is hard to make people like the new network.

Moreover, people can also choose to keep using the other social networks. But, for me, and I believe for most of the other people too, I will just use my one dream social network.

It is not yet a complete picture of my dream social network. Not only must the social network give me control over my past and present life, but also it has to enable me to build a better future life, not just a future. Mark Zuckerberg might not believe in privacy anymore. But, I do. Our digital life is the mirror of our real life. And as much as privacy matters in the real life, it shall matter in digital life.

When we see people live in the real life, they always have boundaries and norms. There are always considerations before sharing things. We consider who we share with, what we share, and when we share it because anything wrong with this may give bad impacts on us. And this is how the digital life has to be, too. As much as we can control our privacy in real life, we also have to be able to do it the same way in the digital life.

All pieces collected in the new social network and everything we add to it will become our digital identity, a true figure of ourselves. The more things we put in there, the more it reflects the real us. However, not everyone needs to know everything. As in real life, we do not reveal everything about us to anyone. We only share a specific part of our life to each person around us. Does it mean that we want to hide the other parts of our lives? Or does it mean that we try to build good image when we do not have one? No! It is not about faking our identity, but it is about being real. That is how we do it in the real life.

The last thing about my dream social network is regarding photo and video tagging. I believe there should be a better mechanism in putting pictures or videos in social networks to protect the privacy of people that might be captured unintentionally in those media. Anything posted in the network can spread in seconds throughout the world. And, for many reasons, we do not always want anyone to know where we are or what we do at particular times.

Using face recognition technology, all faces in the uploaded pictures or videos should not be revealed until getting permission from the respective people. To describe it using Facebook, all faces in pictures and videos will be blurred once they are uploaded. The one who uploaded them will then tag other people. The faces will then be revealed and named only when the tagged people approve it. Since anyone can be tagged and can approve just to reveal the faces, better technology should also be used to validate if the tagged person is the right one by comparing the faces to their personal pictures.

So, to answer my first question, getting exposure might be the idea behind the success of social networks, but it is not worth it if it makes us losing control over our digital lives. It is a problem if we realise it and it will just become bigger in the future if there is no changes made on how the social networks work.

Finally, I cannot wait for this new social network to be available. I need to gain back my control over my digital life – the past, the present, and the future.

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