Describing recent privacy policy changes, Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder says in an interview:

"A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they've built, doing a privacy change - doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner's mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it." (qtd. in Kirkpatrick)

He wanted to keep a beginner's mind, a beginner who presumably fits into the social norm of accepting default publicity, searchability. But I wonder who this person is-and to what extent the average user of social media is strong-armed into the narrative of a space? Is the beginner one who is already part of this public-loving cultural trend Zuckerberg claims to reflect? Or is the beginner someone who takes to the default like baby formula-cautiously clinging to their noob-garb, slowly learning the customizations? In which case- how can we lay accountability on the user whose opening experience is determined by the Zuckerberg's of the world who are trying to think like the newbies? Just one example from this week's readings that made me cringe a little as I asked "who the hell are these people?"

The next came from The Rumpus, who offered us an interview with an anonymous Facebook employee. The loose-lipped worker spilled her guts about a master password that once allowed its user to assume the identity of any FB account holder. A few points of interest here:

they don’t give a fuck. Just get your shit done. Hence I was able to ditch work, come have two pitchers with you, and I will literally be able to go back and get my work done. And it goes a long way. Because I know I can get these things done. I know I’m going to have to go back. And I may be there until ten or eleven tonight.

Sweet! Drunken FB employees have access to all my information-everything I've ever said or done or clicked on-at ten at night. But, luckily, she only knows of two instances of people being fired to foul play. Course then there's the users- who is this guy?:

This guy had emailed my friend at school a very very odd message, pertaining to the name ‘Caitlin,’ which is her name, and ‘poop.’ It was literally one of the creepiest things I’ve ever seen: a two-page message about the name ‘Caitlin’ and its semantic relation to ‘poop.’ We found out that he had actually sent it to the first two hundred Caitlins he found on Facebook search.

So...we got dudes who are anal retentive about Caitlins (ahahahahaha), drunk employees with unlimited access to our info, and really rich people controlling the situation by trying to think like beginners. Awesome.

I believe Gurak's discussion of bottom-up online rhetorical communities can help us understand something about who these people are and why/how online debates about online privacy are so complicated. In discussing the reaction to Lotus, she writes:

The bottom-up structure of this protest, so conducive to individual participation and open debate, is thus highly susceptible to the intrusion of inaccuracies, which, given the rapidity of online delivery, can easily be compounded with each new posting. (91)

In the case of Lotus I wondered who these people were who just signed petitions and supported causes they didn't really understand. But as Gurak explains it, many people participating in these protests did so on the basis of commitment to the perceived ethos of the group- things circulate quickly, people side with their friends, people get fired up and pass things along with trust... come to think of it I AM that person! I have been known to vote Dem in local categories without really understanding the issues or candidates' platforms. I have supported suggested Facebook causes. I have click "accept" on more terms of service than I can even pretend to have actually read. I'm busy, and I don't feel that that should keep me from being a good citizen, so I rely on what I have come to believe I can trust-the Dems are the good guys (and gals), gay marriage should be legal and if my support of a FB page can help, word, and most web services that aren't porn related will not try to steal all my info or give my computer viruses, right? Hmmm.

I think what this all boils down to for me is that people are just people on both sides of the public/corporate privacy battle, and people are busy, and greedy, and manipulative, and anal retentive, and they like to drink with friends even if it means they have to work late.  So the accountability is just as dispersed and widely distributed and bottom-up and top-down and beginner-oriented and susceptible to intrusion as the networks that Gurak describes.

As a side note-though perhaps the most important point I'm making since above is really just an expression of head-shaking disbelief, I wonder what Gurak's study would look like today with say the comments on Kirkpatrick's blog alone? This is definitely not the only place this conversation is happening, and it seems to be a bottom-up protest all over again. I'm guessing someone has already made a petition using Facebook's causes or fan pages against itself-hell there are like 10 with different names. Is there the same sort of identifiable community ethos thing going on? Wouldn't it be interesting to look at how Gurak's ideas about community are challenged by broader access alone? I wonder if/how a protest against this privacy policy could even be effective now. (Though I remember the users pushed for the overturn of the whole FB owns all original content posts through Notes thing after much outcry from a presumably experienced user-class who know what they can expect as far as their rights to privacy and such go....) K, I'm disgruntled myself now and going to bed. Happy Olympic Gold on home turf, Canada!