The Postconsumer Is Always Online

Writing about the spread of television, Marshall McLuhan employed the implosion metaphor. For centuries, transport technology enabled the reaching of physically distant places. TV enabled a different kind widening of one's perception, to make events and stories implode in one's home and mind and nervous system. The Web is a mode of communication that makes such extension of human perception more sophisticated and interactive. Thanks to the Web, it's possible to communicate in a personal way with other users, with interactivity so strong that it comes close to face-to-face communication. And Web 2.0 further expands along this line of development. In his prophetic novel Neuromancer, William Gibson foresaw a world where Net experience was not a supplement to everyday life, but life itself. Today's social networks are not the implementation of such dystopian vision, but they still exhibit some of the characteristics that work of cyberpunk fiction first described: the tendency to put one's life online, the trend toward the full publicity of private lives, which social networking is so much about (thus interestingly mirroring TV's reality shows).
New media and communication technologies generate new opportunities, but also new fears, as occurs with every other innovation. TV has always be accompanied by fears about the broadcasting of unsuitable content to vulnerable segments of viewers. The same can be said about the rise of Internet content. Now Web 2.0, meaning Internet understood as a platform for sociability, generates its own peculiar worries. Significant parts of our lives are now uploaded on the Net. We declare our dreams, provide real-time updates about everyday errands and events. We publish photos that once would have been confined to the dusty photo albums in our drawers. Thus the issue of online privacy for the user and the consumer alike emerges strongly. We have come a long way from a world where we feared what TV could bring into our homes, to a world where we fear what could sneak out online about, or of, ourselves. We could reach the postconsumer paradox by which your family album becomes the legal property of the site's owner. A skeptic might ask: how much do we really own of our own lives?
Recently, Facebook's Beacon project exposed the faultlines of the debate surrounding online privacy. Beacon was launched in November 2007 as a system which would make automatically visible on your friends' pages the purchases made on other sites linked to Beacon. This system was harshly criticized by Facebook users for breaching the online privacy of consumers.

The episode shows how the dividing line between real life and online life is becoming increasingly blurred. This does not necessarily mean that the Net is intrinsically dangerous, but it suggests that we'd better clearly understand its strong potential for innovation in order to better manage it. We are likely to evolve toward always on, interconnected human beings, constantly exchanging information with others, whether we are willing or not. This is the nature of the postconsumer world; how close are we to it?