Monthly Archive for April, 2010

Don’t worry, these are his own words. Finally, I saw Jeff Jarvis – the one and only Jeff speaking about privacy issues and highlighting international differences. In Germany, he says, everything is private – except for private parts – sharing his experiences in the sauna. In the US, on the contrary, he mentions criminals in the public sphere – something we Germans will never get used to, hopefully.

He was trying to find some reasons why privacy issues in Germany are so comlex – calling it the Deutschland Paradoxon. He was asking, why blogging is not taking off the way it has in America. He was wondering if it had anything to do with the fact that in German culture we „lack sharing knowledge and we mistrust the fools giving it away for free“. Somebody had also mentioned to him that since we WERE liberated, we are not blogging.

JJ concludes, that not privacy is the issue – control is. He states that privacy = control.

· Control of our data

· Control of our creations

· Control identities

· Reputation is dead

He recommended the bill of rights in cyberspace, written in 1996 and concludes that we must DEFEND THE PUBLIC! Because „The public owns what’s public“.

He talk about the doctrine of mutually assured humiliation – meaning that „in the company of nudists, no one is naked“. And that there is a lesson to be learned from the Germans’ attitude of FKK. In his very American way, he explains the value of publicness by talking about prostate cancer and – there is nothing more private –why he wrote about it. Why? Because he got value! He got information, links, new connections, he even got people who also shared their experiences. And then, again in his very American way, he asked the audience if we got tested and I think I realized some form of disconnect – his understanding of publicness and privacy is quite different from my own. JJ talks about transparency and a million watchdogs and started defending Google’s streetview processes and I thought – his trust in the market is frightening. One guy in the audience pointed that out and said that Americans often mistrust Government, whereas the Germany usually mistrust the market. Google does not equal publicness and I am not quite sure if JJ sees it that way, too.

But, I will discuss this with him in a publica sauna – naked!