Anil Dash wants us to consider what it is we mean when we say that something is public, especially when we are talking about something that is accessible over the Internet. He tells us that “Public is not just what can be viewed by others, but a fragile set of social conventions about what behaviors are acceptable and appropriate.” I couldn’t agree more. The conversations about how those conventions and behaviors should change in the face of new and emerging technology are important, but part of the problem is that the conversations are plural and not a unity. While his contribution to these conversations has much that is of value, I think Dash acts badly when he withholds the benefit of the doubt and does not bother to explore the larger conversations that are already happening. He also appears to greatly underestimate just how fragile one community’s specification of “public” is in the face of the sheer scale of the Internet.

Dash directs his ire at two groups — the media and the technologists. In his view, each group is pushing a specification of public that is entirely consistent with their interests and nothing else, and this specification is dominant because these industries are powerful. The entire piece is couched in the rhetoric of interest and power as opposed to ethics and the common good. No one denies that interests and power are big, important factors in how things play out. But if we’re going to have a conversation, let’s talk, rather than merely accuse.

Both of the industries that Dash believes are ruining publicness for the rest of us have big, ongoing conversations about the nature of privacy and of public ethics. He only links to one extended argument from a person in the accused industries — a Gawker piece that is indeed both condescending and poorly argued. From the tech industry we get an embedded tweet from Jason Calacanis, and nothing more. This is not exactly what I would call giving a good faith hearing of each side!

Moreover, the Gawker piece is responding to an incident and a series of conversations that are much more nuanced than the piece’s response to them. In particular, a Buzzfeed article whose author claimed to get consent from the people whose tweets they used, and the accusation that they did no such thing. I don’t know the details, but it seems clear that the very fact that they felt the need to keep up appearances, if indeed they didn’t get consent, shows that they understood consent to be important to the ethics of the matter.

Say what you will about journalists, they do at least talk about ethics. In fact, they talk about it quite a lot, and usually not explicitly in its relation to their interests. The Society of Professional Journalist’s Code of Ethics speaks not of the interest of the publication as opposed to the interest of the public; instead they talk about the public interest as opposed to the tension with respecting the private lives of individuals. There’s a conversation there that Dash has not bothered to engage with. For myself, I think there was something wrong with the media industry’s conventions about what is public before the Internet, and doubt that it will get any better in this new reality. But I do think that it’s worth talking about.

I know much more about the state of the conversation within the tech industry, and it is far from accepting “binary” as the natural state of things. Paul Adams’ extended argument that there are specific social contexts offline which social networks are bad at honoring went viral and became a central piece in the conversation about privacy and publicness. Adams was working at Google at the time, then went on to be a big product guy at Facebook, and is now working at a startup. He’s not an outlier but a typical, if untypically thoughtful, member of this community. Moreover, danah boyd, who is one of the most nuanced thinkers on privacy and publicness around today, works for Microsoft. And while Dash might not agree with Jeff Jarvis’ take on publicness, he is certainly more nuanced than that Gawker piece and actually defends his points with arguments rather than condescending assertions.

No one knows how our conventions and notions of acceptable behaviors with regard to “public” ought to change in our new technological reality. But these communities are talking about it, and I don’t think it is either fair or productive for Dash to simply reduce them to interest groups who are inflicting uniform, simplistic specifications of “public” on the rest of us.

Moreover, it is the very pluralness of communities that make Dash’s goal so difficult. To understand this, we must first ask: who is Dash’s implied audience? As a tech industry insider himself and something of a public figure, his implied audience sometimes seems to be the tech and media communities — in which case, one wonders why he didn’t do more to engage with them. But in his rhetoric, in speaking of finding an understanding of what “public” is in order to “protect the public’s interest”, his implied audience seems to be the rest of us — that is, we the People, the citizenry, the masses, everyone except for those acting in their capacity as interested members of the media or the tech community.

But there are many publics, not one; many communities, not a unitary whole. And in our age of scalable individual-sized mediums, this creates certain vulnerabilities for particular specifications of “public”. Let us say that a community forms around a version of “public” that Dash would be happy with. Let us further assume that the media, say, honor this specification across the board. Nevertheless, if people outside of both of those communities embrace the Gawker specification and pass around a tweet that they find interesting or offensive, it might go viral and then we’d be back at square one. The potential for something to go viral is a fact that media and technologists may participate in but is, I believe, an ineradicable fact of modern life. There is no conceivable technological architecture or law that could abolish the phenomenon of going viral, without also abolishing free speech and discussion which occurs out in the open.

This was a pre-Internet problem as well, though not nearly so pervasive. I think the number of people who believe that the practices of tabloid journalists are ethical is vanishingly small. Even mainstream journalists frown upon such practices, but tabloids form a community of their own, with their own ethics (such as they are). And it would be very hard to legally restrain such behavior without damaging freedom of speech and, more specifically, restraining other behaviors that we might think are valuable, such as holding politicians and other powerful people accountable by exposing their actions.

I think Dash’s piece is valuable in how it poses the question of publicness in our networked age. I just do not think it productively connects with the many conversations on the subject that are already in progress, and I’m not not sure his goal of “understanding exactly” what public is in some unitary way is attainable.