I don't think she is naive and its a good thing to be optimistic. She touched on a core issue that social networks will have a hard time addressing in the coming years. Perhaps it is because its they tried hard to mimic how relationships worked in the moment and people change, moment by moment. I think the problem that needs to be solved is that people change organically, moment by moment until they are a very different person because of the many small changes that occur through the years.
There are no tools that I know of to provide this context of individual change for those who read what we have written or recorded on video years after the fact. And speaking only for myself, I have changed a little since yesterday and a lot since my early twenties.
Does that make sense? If we think about leaving a legacy for people we can't know but will be able to speak to in ten or thirty years, how do we provide them the insight into the significant or cumulative changes that influenced changes our beliefs? It's not like we can sit down with them over a beer and say, "That thing I wrote about social issue X, well I used to believe Y about it and then really significant things happend to me and I completely changed. I know it's weird."
I believe these are very difficult tools to build because they have to capture some of the more ephemeral aspects of humanity in a way thats easy for the producer to manage and the consumer to quickly comprehend.
I think gradual change is less of a problem than simultaneous multiple personas, at least from the point of view of an online identity system.
As long as you're comfortable with letting other people know that your views on some social issue was different in the past, you can change as much as you want and still have all of your different selves tied to a single online identity. Companies that track your preferences can also learn to give more weight to your recent activities, profile you based on your background, etc. They will never be able to capture exactly who you are at any given moment, but they can be reasonably accurate on a timescale of months. If there's enough demand, they could even produce a timeline showing your changing preferences over several years or even decades. For example, it would be really interesting to chart a person's movement through the Political Compass [1] over his lifetime, instead of just representing him as a point on the graph.
On the other hand, if you want to use different personas simultaneously, the identity system breaks down immediately. Advertisers, of course, hate that. It might be possible to target ads for someone who changed from X to Y over a period of 5 years. But how do you target ads for someone who pretends to be several contradictory things at the same time?
My line of thought was from a single persona who articulates an honest reflection of their view at the time. It won't matter if the opinion is right or wrong if social mores change, even if i changed with them, it's a reflection of who I was at that moment. But who we are changes moment to moment, day to day and year to year. What I am trying to get at is people, perhaps my great grandchildren or people I never meet and interact with will come across something I have written and never updated, or forgotten about entirely and then gone on about my day. Those people will need a tool to place that into a larger context or they will misunderstand how I got to the place I ended up. And I just want to be clearly understood, now and a hundred years from now.
What if social mores have drastically changed since that time and I have changed too? What if I am dead and gone, how do I let them know that as I evolved as a person going through life, my beliefs and my opinions have changed.
The tool that would let me do that is a tool I would love to have. Social networks do not have good tools for this yet.
There are no tools that I know of to provide this context of individual change for those who read what we have written or recorded on video years after the fact. And speaking only for myself, I have changed a little since yesterday and a lot since my early twenties.
Does that make sense? If we think about leaving a legacy for people we can't know but will be able to speak to in ten or thirty years, how do we provide them the insight into the significant or cumulative changes that influenced changes our beliefs? It's not like we can sit down with them over a beer and say, "That thing I wrote about social issue X, well I used to believe Y about it and then really significant things happend to me and I completely changed. I know it's weird."
I believe these are very difficult tools to build because they have to capture some of the more ephemeral aspects of humanity in a way thats easy for the producer to manage and the consumer to quickly comprehend.