The rising Approval Ceiling, and the death of Privacy

This is a bit of a downer, but I think it's important.

Imagine you are a baseball player in the Steroid Era. Your predecessors of the early '80s thought that hitting 40 home runs was a real accomplishment – but now hitters are blowing past 40 in August and earlier. You can't keep up, and then you find out that the inflated numbers are achievable, if only you invest in certain drugs. What do you do?

The same phenomenon exists today, in the world of Popularity, and it's radically changing our teens.

Twenty years ago, popularity for a teen meant your high school peers knew you and liked you. Maybe, if you were a star athlete, you were known around town and in competing schools. If you were a star academic, you might have some notoriety in your field, if there was a large enough prize for your brand of achievement. The "approval ceiling" maxed out in the 100-500 range, as a rule.

Today, thanks to the Internet and social networking, a high schooler with only 100-500 "friends" is an outcast. Your own friends, and then their friends, are a social circle of thousands. The big dream is to go viral with a meme, picture, tweet or video, and then you are in the millions. Through networking, the Approval Ceiling is sky-high. Never mind that this "approval" is shallow and fleeting, it's the standard by which you are evaluated.

But what steroid do you take? How do you impress thousands of people, or millions? Not by working out so that you look physically impressive. Not by acing an exam, or buying a cool leather jacket. No one can see you! You need to be out there, visible, working the network, showing people your abs or your grade or your bling. You need to drop the notion of privacy, and embrace the stage.

This is what our teens do; to my mind, this is why they text and sext, record silly videos and tweet details that in the past were considered private. Nothing is too private when it comes to impressing thousands of people. For this generation, suggesting that they keep their dating or mental health struggles or personal habits to themselves is the equivalent of suggesting to an earlier generation that they not enter a sports competition, run for school president, or go to the party everyone who is anyone is attending. Self-revelation is their steroid, to hit 70 home runs. How am I going to make friends if I keep to myself? And so the rising Approval Ceiling has dynamited privacy.

Thomas Friedman wrote the other day about Popularism, and the phenomenon of politicians sacrificing leadership and depth in pursuit of popularity. I don't think this is new for politicians, except perhaps in intensity. The concept of sacrificing for popularity is not new for teens, either, but the levels of popularity they can achieve are unprecedented for teens, and they are proving all too willing to make whatever leap is necessary in order to get there.

Privacy – or tzniut, as it is known in Judaism – has always been a bit of a ball and chain, to those who thought that being more revealing would win them friends. Today, though, the the temptation of sky-high popularity, and the absolute necessity of being "out there" in order to achieve it, is a game-changer, and privacy is left in the dust.

New from Google Labs: Google Honor

[Side note: Mazal Tov to me – At some point this past week we passed 100,000 page views on this blog. Of course, the number is somewhat undercounted, since many visits are not recorded by Sitemeter. Still, I appreciate the milestone, and thanks for reading!]

I am always amused when I check my “referrals” – the searches that bring people to my site. Some are conventional, like “Purim rabbi costume” “how to choose a rabbi” and “Judaism prohibits fun.” Others are more quirky, as in “husband punishment” and “Female Messianic Rebbetzin.” But among my favorites are the searches people do on their own names.

It’s no secret that people search for their own names on the Internet; who doesn’t want to know what people are saying about him, where she is being quoted, etc? And, yes, it’s a good idea to keep up on that sort of thing, just like we track ours credit ratings.

So I’ve been wondering. How about a new Google App: Google Honor.

Google Honor would fit with the company’s attempts to provide data of interest to the public: Develop software that finds people’s names on web pages, and assigns those names a score based on the positive or negative adjectives that appear in proximity to their names.

Higher scores would go to someone whose name appears in a sentence like, “Mordechai Torczyner is an amazing speaker,” lower scores to someone whose name appears in a sentence like, “Tim Horton is an awful speaker.”

Of course, this would require some optimizing, given popular phrases the meanings of which are vague to a non-human ear. As in, “I found Adam Smith's claims incredible,” and, “Donna Jones' work is amazingly bad,” and “Jason Menelaus's topic was frightening, but he handled it well.” The software would need significant sophistication.

But imagine if you could search your name and then get a score: 318, or 205, or -4350.

Imagine if you could search for your name and find out how nicely, or not nicely, people are talking about you, in just an instant.

Imagine if you could watch your popularity ebb and flow.

Imagine if you could know, with a simple number, exactly what people think about you.

Imagine – um.

Okay, maybe not.