Graham Hatch’s blog post about privacy issues at Google and Facebook includes some interesting musings on the dotcom world:

I’ve long had a sense that there is an assumption in the dotcom world which deems that because they are inventing the future they don’t really need to be concerned by the conventions of the past.

[T]he problem with dotcom culture [is that m]any of its practitioners lack any real sense of seriousness or objectivity about the enormous role they now play in the daily social behaviour of their users—and the fact, that in playing such a role, they serve to reinforce, amplify and exaggerate human failings as much as attributes.

Valerie Casey made the same point at SXSW, though in a more positive light. The designers, architects and programmers of the social web are building the infrastructure for the next era of our civilization. They (we!) need to take that responsibility seriously.