Ich bitte vielmal um Entschuldigung wenn ich bei diesem Blogpost direkt ins Englische verfalle aber das liegt an dem interessanten Vortrag von Jeff Jarvis, der mich heute auf der re:publica mit jeder Menge englischer Theorien über „Publicness und das Netz“ vollgestopft hat… und das muss jetzt irgendwie verarbeitet werden. I hope my english is good enough for all of you to follow and hopefully not messing up with too much grammar…

Well, first you will notice the headline which is very uncommon but when you see the story behind it it will lead us straight to the point. This whole thing about publicness didn´t really get through to me even that I have my own blog since several years now. But it is obvious that there are a lot more private things out in the public through twitter, facebook and other services than all the years before.

Most of us refere to this as actually a bad thing and are afraid of giving too much information out in public. But is it really that bad to have all this information for everybody to see and share? Or is it just us not getting the essence behind the advantage of this?

Jeff Jarvis at his speech today at re:publica made one point clear.
EVERYTHING THAT IS PUBLIC BELONGS TO ALL OF US.
And therefore it is our job to protect that public information from being taken away from us again. This is the gift of the new era of THE WEB!

re:publica Illustration zum Vortrag von Jeff Jarvis

Take for example the point that Jeff Jarvis talked in his blog about his cancer and his own penis problems resulting from this. Most of us would refer that this should stay private and not to circle around the net. But thanks to this he found so much other people that had similar problems that helped him and each other by talking in public about their illness that the advantages are far better then any problems with privacy about it. So was this a bad thing to do?

Maybe it is just a German thing? Jeff’s feeling while talking to Germans was that we all see people who share their knowledge and wisdom in public as fools. And do you know what? I AGREE. He is right. I have to admit it. It is a German thing.

On the one hand we have FKK (Freie Körper Kultur) in Germany which is in the US unthinkable. So while Germans belief if all people are naked nobody has a problem with differences anymore. We take it totally the other way around while sharing information in public. We don´t see the benefit of publicness over hiding information for the purpose of money.

So I guess it will be an educational thing for all of us to teach our friends and our children or our employers and the public to get the benefits out of sharing things in public. This is one of the battles we have to win. Let´s make a step forward in using the new technology to our whole purpose and not taking a step back in hiding information because of fear. If we can not accept this, we are agreeing to be just an under aged user again. But did we not all choose to be creative and decide everything on our own, not driven by advertising or media?
Therefore lets build and defend our publicness for the greater benefit of all!

Thank you Jeff for this valuable insight.
Any feedback on this in any language is appreciated.