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Comment by storborg | Hacker News Reader

The author's example of screaming in the street is moot: most meaningful social interactions happen in a setting with far more information about the people you're interacting with: e.g. a college bar, a tradeshow, a cocktail party, a museum.

You're very rarely interacting with no context at all, and most interactions are among friends, where you have much more information than is contained in a Facebook profile.

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Agreed. But 99.9% of your real-life statements aren't stored permanently as they are online. This allows us to be more honest with our friends. We don't have to worry that something we said 10 years ago in a bar will be available today verbatim to those friends and to whoever those friends share it with... and with a strong possibility of people who we don't even know listening in. (In the digital sphere, privacy restrictions are much easier to circumvent than the space-time limits of real-life.)

And more careful selection of who knows it, generally, with less ability for people to verify what they've been told if they stand outside the trusted circle. Moreover, memory isn't permanent in the brain but social network companies seem to be interested in making it very permanent in the data center.

True, but let's not conflate the issues of identity vs. verification vs. permanence. People can still lie on their social networking profiles, and anything in the real world can still be recorded. Even if social networking companies didn't push to make their data persistent, any viewer of that data could cache it for all time.

>let's not conflate the issues of identity vs. verification vs. permanence

I think that's the entire point of the article - that those issues combine to be a factor on social networks in a way that they very rarely do offline.

To put it another way: on social networks, assuming you use your real name (which is the issue), all three of identity, verification, and permanence are true by default, and false only as exceptions. Offline, you may get one or two, but rarely all three at once.

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