We're all celebrities in post-privacy age

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Move over, Paris Hilton. We all have celebrity issues in an age when anyone can create an online profile, post confessional videos on YouTube, or make snarky online comments about other people.

The latest generation of Web sites -- which attract tens of millions of users daily to share words, photos and videos about themselves and their friends -- make a virtue of openness at the expense of traditional notions of privacy.

"My grandparents would have had a different attitude about privacy," says Jeff Jarvis, a former critic for TV Guide turned top blogger and columnist for the Guardian in London.

"There is a different calculus now," he says.

Sites like Facebook, Photobucket and Flickr are enjoying surging popularity for allowing people to control their online identities in ways that make the danger of revealing too much information a constant worry -- and all part of the game.

"Within the Web realm there is no private self," argues David Weinberger, author of a newly published book, "Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder."

"The closest you can mean is that you are with a small group behind some password-protected mechanism," he says.

The danger of such exposure is that it could affect careers when students seek jobs in the real world or private citizens seek public office.

George W. Bush and Bill Clinton might never have been elected president had sites like Google Inc.'s YouTube or News Corp.'s MySpace, the world's biggest online meeting places, existed to record the events of their younger years.

But while policy makers ponder how to bolster online anonymity, social network users are more concerned about deciding what to reveal about themselves next.

CONTROL, COMMUNITY TRUMP PRIVACY

Most users of the new self-publishing tools report finding a stronger sense of community among friends, family and random Web site visitors who share their interests.

Facebook, a site started by a Harvard University undergraduate as a way for students to get to know one another, has exploded in popularity among professional users in Britain and the United States since the site took steps to open up to people of all ages over the past year. It now claims 25 million active users, who like the control Facebook gives them over who they let into their network of online acquaintances.

"What Facebook does is it allows me to control my identity and my society -- my group of friends," Jarvis says. "You can call it privacy or you can call it publicness. I am controlling both sides of that equation, together -- that's the secret."

Highlighting his own change of thinking on the subject of privacy, Jarvis revealed last year in a blog post, entitled "My cheatin' heart," that he was suffering from a medical condition that slowed work on his widely read media criticism blog, BuzzMachine (www.buzzmachine.com/). Supportive comments, and advice about potential treatments, poured in.

"Revealing a little bit of yourself is the only way to make connections to other people and that is how the Internet works," Jarvis says. "I couldn't have gotten that benefit unless I revealed the condition."

Caterina Fake, co-founder of popular photo sharing site Flickr, said recently that the defining moment for her start-up was when it decided all photos on the site would be public. Previously, photo sites had assumed users photos should be private, unless deliberately published for public consumption.

Mena Trott, who, with her husband, Ben, developed Movable Type, a software system for publishing blogs, says "control" is a better word than "privacy" for defining oneself in different situations on the Web.

"We think blogging is sharing the stuff you care about with the people you care about," Trott says. "It comes down to control. They may or may not use it. But people want control."

Trott's company, Six Apart, makes publishing tools used by everyone from Hollywood gossip reporters to moms who seek to document their everyday lives, in private or semi-public mode.

"The Internet is often accused of leading to uncivil behavior," Jarvis says. "Identity will lead to civility because we are being watched. It's like living in a small town again."