The Word: Publicy

You’ll have seen this word flying about recently and it’s time for some explanations.

Err… don’t you mean ‘pub­lic­ally’? [’publicly’ if you’re American]

No. Well, in some ways, yes, I do. Let me explain.

In the past, there has been an assump­tion that privacy was the default state of human exist­ence. It was only when you, someone or some­thing else acted on that state that your privacy was broken. You did some­thing ‘in public’, ‘went public’ or ‘pub­lished’. But if that was ever really the case — I’d argue that it’s partly a symptom of late C20th urban living — then it most cer­tainly not true at this point in the early 21st Century. There’s a database entry just a few seconds after your birth that stays attached to you for the rest of your life. Everyone has got inform­a­tion on you — lots of it — from the gov­ern­ment to the police to the super­mar­kets you use. And they’ll probably lose it or allow it to be stolen at some point.

Things get even worse when it comes to the Internet: your ISP is mon­it­oring your data stream; Facebook is keeping your teenage indis­cre­tions alive forever; Google is retaining your search history. Our brave new world of mobile applic­a­tions some­times seems par­tic­u­larly geared to recording (and judging!) your location to within a few yards using GPS.

So one part of the meaning of publicy is this status of not having privacy, for which his­tor­ic­ally we haven’t had a single word, so strong is the assump­tion that privacy is the natural state of affairs.

People aren’t entirely happy about this being the case, of course. And that draws in the second part of the meaning of the word. But first, some background…

We have strong personal, social, pro­fes­sional and polit­ical reasons for having an attach­ment to secrets and lies. While we’re told that we have nothing to fear from lack of privacy; unless we’ve done some­thing wrong, in which case we deserve what we get. That’s not really true. In fact, it’s not true at all.

Secrets and Lies

Most reli­gions and philo­sophies suggest that ‘telling the truth’ is a moral neces­sity. But this isn’t entirely the case. Secrets and lies are arguably essen­tial to our psy­cho­lo­gical well-​​being. Certainly, they’re essen­tial to everyone getting along without a fight every two seconds. By some accounts, we lie 200 times a day just to keep the peace.

Personal lies: ‘No, of course you’re not fat’; ‘No, it’s great that your mother is coming to stay’.

Social lies: ‘How am I feeling? Really good thanks’, ‘Oh yes, how is [child-​​name]? Do you have any more pictures?’

Professional lies: ‘great work, Bob’; ‘it’s been a pleasure doing business with you’; ‘we have the utmost respect for [com­pet­itor company]’.

Political lies: ‘We will cut taxes and maintain quality of public services’.

Secrets – probably best not to tell your mum that you take drugs, your wife that you fancy one of your col­leagues; your boss that he stinks; your wartime allies that you think they are crass vul­garians. The place of secrets in our lives is more dif­fi­cult to describe than the neces­sity of lying, but rather than dredge the lit­er­ature right now, I think we’ll agree to agree (won’t we?) that we all have secrets and that their remaining secret is important to us.

The other dif­fi­culty is that this rise in public inform­a­tion has happened a lot more quickly that our society’s ability to come to terms with the con­sequences of that. We’re not espe­cially good at for­giving and for­get­ting, for example, pre­fer­ring instead to remember forever and condemn you for that one stupid thing you did five years ago.

So… Publicy?

Ah yes. The other part of the meaning of the word is very much akin to ‘pub­li­city’. You see, there are two common tactics to coping with the loss of privacy:

Disinformation. Some 50% of teen­agers post false inform­a­tion about them­selves onto the Net. It’s been observed that if you look at the regis­tra­tion data, 10% of MySpace users are aged over 100, which seems rather unlikely, unless you factor in that you’re not supposed to register unless you’re 14 or over. [see the video below for more on this and other stats I cite]. Apparently, everyone lies on dating sites (men say they’re more suc­cessful; women that they’re younger and slimmer). If you counter the number of true facts about you that exist on record with a similar number of complete lies then the reli­ab­ility of all the data is ser­i­ously compromised.

Curation. We make sure that the inform­a­tion that appears is, to the best of our ability, san­it­ised, presenting our ‘best side’. We untag drunken pictures of ourselves on Facebook; we don’t check in to FourSquare when we’re in McDonald’s and do when we’re in the Ritz; we remove ‘dodgy’ music from our Last.fm profiles. We use pseud­onyms when we’re on networks that don’t reflect what we want to be part of our pro­fes­sional repu­ta­tion. If someone or some­thing is pro­du­cing inform­a­tion about you, then you make sure to produce more, better quality information.

From the Economist’s report this week on Social Networks:

Research pub­lished last year by Pew showed that some 60% of adults are restricting access to their online profiles. In an earlier study the insti­tute had found that, contrary to received opinion, many teen­agers and young adults are also using privacy controls to restrict access to online inform­a­tion about them. Nicole Ellison, a pro­fessor at Michigan State University who studies social networks, says that over the past few years she has noticed that her students have become steadily more cautious about whom they share inform­a­tion with.

This cor­rup­tion or cor­rec­tion of the inform­a­tion avail­able about ourselves is the other side of the idea of ‘publicy’. Publicy isn’t the opposite or the death of privacy: it is the way we live when it is less available.

These ideas aren’t yours, are they?

No, ‘course not. To my know­ledge, the word was coined by Laurent Haug, who founded the Lift con­fer­ence among other achieve­ments. Stowe Boyd wrote about this being the decade of publicy last month, with some great examples of the way dif­ferent cultures accept certain pieces of inform­a­tion as ‘nat­ur­ally to be dis­closed’ or private. PR-​​man Brian Solis wrote about it last week, together with some fas­cin­ating data-​​points (taken from this study) about people’s atti­tudes to social networks that I’m still digesting. e.g.:

How do you pro­nounce it?

I don’t know: it’s that new. It’s either ‘publicky’ or [more likely] ‘publissy’. I quite like this ambi­guity because it rein­forces the dual meaning of ‘living in public’ and ‘gen­er­ating pub­li­city’. I also like that while it’s an utterly ugly word, this ugliness com­mu­nic­ates its mod­ernity rather well.

Anything else to say?

Maybe. Disinformation and curation both seem like coping mech­an­isms, both of which have draw­backs. Disinformation leaves a trail of lies and half-​​truths that might make a person seem like some sort of Walter Mitty fan­tasist when sub­jected to scrutiny. Curation requires time, judge­ment and skill — while it’s well-​​suited to a seasoned PR pro­fes­sional, it’s perhaps less so to those vul­ner­able people who will suffer most from complete disclosure.

Elements of society move at dif­ferent speeds, as I’ve already remarked. Until we’re able to guar­antee an internet Statute of Limitations on how long being an idiot lasts and under what cir­cum­stances it counts, then there will be a dis­con­nect between the abil­ities of tech­no­logy to record us and the abil­ities of the people we deal with to cope with that data. My belief is that it takes several decades — maybe two gen­er­a­tions — for this sort of change. Until then, we’ll have to suck it down.

I don’t make any judge­ment on the fact that we now live publicy and not privately. That’s like railing against the incoming tide.

And this video?

It’s Genevieve Bell, an anthro­po­lo­gist working for Intel, talking about secrets and lies on the Internet at the 2008 Lift con­fer­ence. I’ve cited it before, but it’s well worth a second look. Don’t forget to leave a comment, though.

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