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Ce soir, avec quelques autres membres de la SPN, j’ai assisté à une conférence sur le Web2.0 :  « Buzz, e-reputation, identité numérique : enjeux et menaces sur le web 2.0 », préparée et présentée par les étudiants et futurs professionnels de l’Institut de la Communication et des Technologies Numériques (l’ICOMTEC). Une sorte de présentation pour la sensibilisation des entreprises par les étudiants, au lieu de l’inverse : je ne peux que féliciter l’initiative !

Intéressant de voir comment ces étudiants, moitié mon âge, voient le Web2.0 : j’ai entendu une bonne partie de “menaces”, un peu moins “d’enjeux” et très peu “d’opportunités” – et beaucoup de “Facebook“.

En revanche, il me semble que, en plus de cette attitude (française ?) qui part des principes de “maîtrise”, “surveillance” et “protection” (qui sont, certes, de facettes importantes !), qu’il y avait un problématique non-résolu, lié à l’organisation même de la soirée : destinée à la sensibilisation des entreprises, il y avaient un bon nombre d’étudiants de leur formation + des entreprises déjà initiées + quelques autres entreprises présents dans la salle. Ce qui fausse forcément le débat.
Car je me rends compte que j’attendais d’eux un débat sur le Web2.0 dans toute sa splendeur (:-), alors qu’ils s’attendaient à nous faire connaître les dangers et menaces. Avec en prime des solutions de protection du sphère Web1.0 pour des problématiques Web2.0 – qui en soi ne sont pas inutiles. Chers étudiants, veuillez m’excuser d’avoir exprimé ma voix dissidente .

Car, même si ma vision sur le Web2.0 est plus positive et plus orienté opportunités et valeurs humaines que menaces, je partage avec eux et avec les autres personnes présentes qui se sont exprimées, le souci de la (deuxième) fracture numérique – fracture numérique 2.0 – aujourd’hui pas entre ceux qui ont un ordinateur et ceux qui n’en ont pas (on parle toujours PME en France !), non plus entre ceux qui ont un site Web et ceux qui n’en ont pas, mais entre ceux qui savent développer une attitude Web2.0 et ceux qui ne le font pas. Et nombreux sont les “ceux” dans le dernier cas…. malheureusement.

Il me semble que nous nous trouvons devant un défi/problématique (en termes Web1.0) ou une opportunité (en termes Web2.0) qui est plus grand que celui d’avant le Web : comment faire en sorte que nos entreprises apprennent à faire travailler leurs sites Web (1.0 pour une grande partie, mais peu importe), quid à développer une attitude Web2.0 ? Comment ouvrir les entreprises à des opportunités tout en maîtrisant (…) les risques ? Comment apprendre à la fois les techniques liées à des méthodes de gestion différentes et d’autre part, les attitudes et relations dans un monde de réseaux sociaux ? Comment faire surmonter les peurs et angoisses devant de telles problématiques ?

Quelques mots clés (”tags”) apparaissent : ouverture, version bèta éternelle (= testing = possibilité d’erreur !), orienté client, partage, zéro mail et donc… un “cloud” (nuage) de FORMATION et de SENSIBILISATION. Une sorte de plan de relance en période de crise donc, et pas moins, sera nécessaire !

In Van Elsas’ excellent blog post about privacy he describes, referring to  Scott McNealy’s 2001 article “Privacy is dead, get over it”, the dangers of ‘publishing or sharing personal data on the web’.

I would like to comment to two of the issues he raises, since I am convinced that, ‘au fond’, life has not changed that much.

ON ‘reputation‘, for exemple, he writes…

Our reputation in the old days was contained within the social relationships we were involved with. These relationships were naturally confined to locations, time and people we knew. On the web this has changed dramatically. Now everybody has access to personal information of anyone online.

Now, in the country I live in, France, this is perhaps less true than in the relative transparent and vertically organized countries like The Netherlands, but I happen to believe that it is true wherever you live.
When I first arrived in the remote village of Sepvret, in the Poitou-Charentes area (SW France), I was impressed by the negative reputations people had built over the years, reputations that they were absolute incapable to modify, to turn into positive appreciations. Whether this was not their intention, or incapacity… probably it was a combination of the two, but fact is that they were confined to the images, most often created over decades ago, and had nowhere else to go or to turn to.

You do not have to meet someone to find out about him.

Quite often, I hadn’t even met my new neighbors, before being introduced to their reputations…

Each of the pieces of information are totally harmless when places in one context, but are quite damaging to your reputation in another. Your reputation is now publicly searchable and without the context of a social environment you are acting in, this can lead to harmful situations.

For me, these ‘pieces of information’ were not harmless at all, I have seen quite a few people suffer a great lot of their reputations, within the context of their social environment, and as said: with no escape like today’s Internet, I am convinced that life in remote areas of the world, just as in urban areas, must have been a burden quite often.

Van Elsas writes about ‘gossip‘:

This is probably an unexpected danger when we build up an online profile. We are much more vulnerable to rumors and gossip. Where this used to remain within the social borders you moved in, they can now reach the entire online world. Anyone that wants to do you harm has a platform to (anonymously) start gossip and rumors about you. As your online reputation gets harmed you will find that it is extremely difficult to protect yourself from this.

May I say that nothing has changed much, again, when comparing with “pre Web 2.0” world? We were equally, if not more, vulnerable to rumors and gossip, and I have more than once witnessed or experienced its devastating personal impact, in different social settings (big village/city – Amsterdam – rural France). The ’social borders ‘ Van Elsas is talking about, were your entire (Real life) world. And whereas you can work on crisis communication in the online world, this seems to be more complicated In Real Life (IRL), where most of the time gossip is not a written issue, and thus more difficult to track back, let alone to react to!

Let’s face it: we all want our parts of celebrity, once we are active members of any online community. We may as well learn then, from the same celebrities: when reading Bernstein’s excellent book about Hillary Rodham Clinton, one is impressed by the stress caused by gossip and (negative) reputation – as well as by the personal strength a person like Hillary Cinton, like other celebrities, has to develop and maintain to stay herself: positive, active and… alive.

Where on the whole, I do agree to Van Elsas’ statement that online personal security and proper handling of personal data is an important issue, I do also believe that Web 2.0 usages are more and more IRL alike, though the scale may be different. In Real Life, we might expect that you give people a second chance, depending on the opportunity – you may do the same online and expect that human attitude in return.

So perhaps the main issue should be: as the web becomes more human, how do we handle other people’s information and are we intelligent enough to look beyond the first impressions, just like we are supposed to do IRL? And how many people are capable of behaving that way, IRL, anyway?