Journal: News & Comment

Live notes: Susan Mernit of Yahoo! Personals at Gnomedex

Permalinks to this entry: individual page or in monthly context. For more material from my journal, visit my home page or the archive.

Sex and relationships in geekland at Gnomedex. A topic that might have made some people uncomfortable, but the discussion was fascinating, and even Chris Pirillo's mom was part of the conversation...

• Every geek has a secret subset of stuff they read or write that's related to sex. Often that's a secret.
• Personas and identity as a freedom to be able to talk about issues they wouldn't otherwise.
• The average sex blogger isn't doing anything non-sex bloggers don't do—they just admit it.
• What can we learn from these revelations?
• Remember that the stuff you post never goes away: Google may not be your friend.
• Your family and friends and co-workers may have very different opinions about what's appropriate to put online.
• It's not just sex, it's relationships. There's mental illness, moral opinions, political feelings.
• You don't know who's reading, but don't forget the power of communities that you might not even know you have built.
• In print we're also more successful, prettier, and taller than in real life.
• How much can we believe: what's fictional, what's not?
• How do these bloggers and others protect themselves and their identities as they wish?
• Has this conversation made everyone uncomfortable?
• Not a lot of people cross their identities over from the personal ads into blogs and Flickr streams.
• Does the current generation (the "Survey Generation") understand that all the information they put out will stay there, and that they might not like that as they get older?
• In the future you might not know when you're being recorded.
• Society will need to evolve to accommodate that.
• "I was 14 and I did dumb 14 year old things."
• It's not a matter of educating young people that the web has a long memory—it's a cultural difference.
• A lot of them do understand it, and they don't care that much.
• And maybe we shouldn't care so much.
• Try to think differently: don't think it's just people under 25. That's a lie. Your friends and family and colleagues and parents are the people who are doing this too.
• This is a profound shift in communication into the power of individual voices about all sorts of topics.

 |