Most of my life, nearly everything I do, everywhere I go and much of what I think, can be found online. I openly share the majority of it with people online from around the world. There is very little about my life that isn’t public. This is a conscious choice, it is not one I made lightly. I am not a celebrity, and so the scrutiny that puts me under is substantially less that what others might face. I also am fortunate in that I am able to maintain control over my privacy for the most part. There are some exceptions, but I already take those into account and mitigate them as much as possible.

Normally I am very open. However, a recent misrepresentation of something that was posted to Twitter (which also posted it to Facebook) has left me a little weary of certain factors. It is almost inevitable that at some point, conflict of one kind or another must come to the fore. This doesn’t mean a violent confrontation, it could just be a simple disagreement. But it is conflict none the less.

That is why the following trailer grabbed my attention so much. Have a look.

This is definitely an interesting story. At this point, there is probably no way I will be able to see the full thing for a very long time. I’d love a DVD copy of it, but chances are they’re not going to release one in who knows how long. So I’ll have to bide my time I guess.

But the premise behind the documentary, and the moral of the story still is very poignant today.

We live in a society where people are giving up huge amounts of their private life to the internet. While many of us may not go to the extremes of someone like iJustine or Chris Pirillo, we each in a way give up much of that which would normally be considered private. Just simply having a Facebook profile is a very good example of this. We share so much of our daily lives with each other that we often lose track of exactly where that information is ending up because there is so much to keep track of.

Depending on your privacy settings in the application, a simple message to Twitter or Facebook can be seen by millions, not just those following you. Often, when people ask me to explain Twitter, I tell them its like a broadcast SMS that anyone can read and anyone can reply to. But there are so many other ways our lives are more public. For example, my FriendFeed page aggregates all social networks I use, plus all websites I use, plus my status from things like Google Talk and so on. All this information would allow organisations to gather a huge amount about my online and offline life. It becomes a rather simple task to see the things I expose to the world.

Combine this with Google’s knowledge of my online activity and suddenly you have a very significant and very public life.

Do we live in public? I think so. And as the internet becomes more prevalent in more devices, this will only become more pronounced. Whether its a good thing or a bad thing, I think we have yet to find out for certain. But it is something that we will need to keep a very active eye on more and more as time progresses.