Privacy is for Losers: Pete Cashmore’s Social Media Hard Sell

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When I first read Mashable founder/CEO Pete Cashmore’s inaugural column on social networking and technology for CNN.com, I thought it was a joke. A clever little send-up of the publish (all your personal details) or perish mentality that seems hellbent on establishing itself as the new paradigm for online interaction:

“We’re living at a time when attention is the new currency: with hundreds of TV channels, billions of Web sites, podcasts, radio shows, music downloads and social networking, our attention is more fragmented than ever before. Those who insert themselves into as many channels as possible look set to capture the most value. They’ll be the richest, the most successful, the most connected, capable and influential among us.”

Believe it or not, he’s dead serious. According to Cashmore, those who choose to hoard their online info will be doomed to “lonely obscurity.” Really, Pete?

Leaving aside the loneliness for a minute, what’s wrong with obscurity? Why is relative anonymity now such a modern-day  horror that folks feel compelled to claim to have fathered Michael Jackson’s children, audition to be on The Bachelor or launch a damn tinfoil weather balloon from their backyard in the hopes of parlaying the media melee into a reality show just to avoid the indignity of living one’s whole life without ever meriting a Wikipedia entry or an IMDB credit? Is that really so bad? Maybe we should ask the 6.493 billion people who AREN’T members of Facebook whether or not they stay up nights mourning their under-the-radar, meaningless existences.

And how did guarding one’s online privacy end up conflated with offline loserdom?  The junior high peer pressure tone of Cashmore’s column is laughable and wouldn’t be out of place as the script for a hackneyed after school special. Just replace all mentions of  Twitter, LinkedIn, FourSquare, etc. with references to slamming crystal meth under the bleachers and then see how it reads. It may seem hard for the cool kids to fathom, but you can actually form connections with people that aren’t entirely predicated on and/or mediated by technology. You can have conversations with them, meet them for coffee, sleep with them, even produce miniature versions of yourself ( I believe this is referred to as procreation, but let me Google it and get back to you). And all without a digital interface. Amazing to contemplate, isn’t it?

If you feel as if you went to bed one night with thoughts of identity theft dancing in your head and  believing that judiciously guarding your electronic information and being mindful of your permanent e-paper trail was SOP and then woke up to be informed you were a non-entity if you weren’t diving headlong into creating and expanding your online personal brand, you’re not alone.  Join the rest of us standing on the shoulder of the information highway still clutching our hand-drawn maps. You shall know us by our lack of iPhones.