So I know that I started off this blog with the intention of submitting to the 2.0 Gods and signing up for as many social networking sites as would have me, and I did this with the ultimate goal of Facebook in mind (is it even worthwhile to sign up for MySpace anymore? Or have we collectively moved on from it?). Seeing the class topics this week, I’ve got my same old feelings of apprehension back again. I know that there are a lot of different restrictions that you can put on your profile on the various networking sites to restrict yourself from being hunted down, but these are deceptive – you’re still left with the problem of your name and identity being in the hands of the moderators and the marketers. When entering your information and personal media onto most of the options out there for social networks, you’re ceding your right to the data that you’re providing. Many claim that there’s nothing to this and that it’s not used for devious purposes, but the potential is definitely still there. I’m always amazed at the amount of spam email that my friends all get sent to their hotmail / gmail / yahoo accounts, and I think that it’s telling that I’m only very, very rarely subject to emails asking me to send money to Nigerian princes or sign up to receive more information about the most recent alternative to Viagra.
More important to me is that the information is stored somewhere, and stored indefinitely – last I checked, one can’t delete a Facebook account but only abandon the data and leave it in their servers. The idea of creating an indelible record of what might be momentary interests is problematic for me, and I’m reminded of the Phaedrus, where Plato calls the text an orphan that we send out into the world, that will outlive us and that will ultimately be (mis)interpreted as a representation of our actual intentions (hence writing as sacrifice). This is pertinent to the internet especially, given that we have very little control over who comes into contact with the information we choose to represent ourselves with. While a company itself may only use the information stored on its servers in specific ways, the changing political environment means that the data stored anywhere may be accessed and used by other authorities as well. The Patriot / Homeland Security acts entitle the NSA and government agencies to far greater access to information than ever before, and in Canada we have the Canadian Revenue Agency recently winning a Supreme Court case against eBay.com that forces them to provide the sales records for all Canadian powersellers so that they can impose taxation on the sale of online goods all the way back to 2004. Information that may be benign right now has the potential to be used later in a negative (or at least intrusive) way.
Albrechtslund’s essay (which we read in 559 this week) on participatory surveillance and the positive attributes of sharing information did little to dissuade me from my negative assumptions of social networking sites. The bulk of his work identified many problems with expressing oneself online, employing and dissecting the oft used analogies of Bentham’s Panopticon and Orwell’s 1984 in light of the file and information sharing that most of us do now.
A real panopticon, in Cuba
The concept of internalizing the outside gaze which ultimately controls your actions and dictates how you express yourself seems very fitting when applied to the online environment – there is a particular online decorum that I think we’ve internalized, much in the same way that we exhibit particular behaviours in particular physical spaces as well, behaviours that ultimately shape our actions even in our private moments.
His final section, however, that contained the bulk of his thesis and motivation for writing the piece (as one can tell from reading the conclusion), seemed to promote participatory surveillance as a sort of means to an end – as lots of good sharing is coming out of these social networking sites, maybe the fact that the information can be used negatively is ultimately worthwhile. There are obvious flaws to this line of thinking, although Albrechtslund does offer the caveat that checks and balances must be put in place so that we don’t fall prey to “privacy invasion and social sorting to fraud and identity theft” (though I wonder about the logic of this claim given that Albrechtslund himself noted the NSA’s completely legal use of online data for profiling and sorting). What I don’t quite follow is the apples-to-oranges nature of his position as he outlines the “positive aspects of (mutual) surveillance,” namely “empowering exhibitionism” and “sharing” which both seem just simply justify the negative attributes of surveillance because the tools allow the inherent reversal as well – everyone is watching, so you can be empowered through exposure and participation in the community, ultimately developing a stronger sense of self. In making this claim, he misrepresents the panopticon metaphor that he himself raised: if the gaze becomes internalized because we know we’re being watched (more importantly that we want to be watched), then this necessarily shapes the ways that we can to express ourselves and in fact removes subjectivity. What’s offered instead are simply channels for expression, predefined avenues through which one can exhibit one’s individuality – the most views on YouTube, for example, or the biggest crops on Farmville as indicators of self actualization are problematic to me. A reductive analysis, maybe, but I think it’s important to recognize that these are the ways that the majority of users employ the tools of the internet – through the avenues that they are allowed. It’s also significant to note that when one is performing online, one does so not to an vast audience of individuals but to a singular ‘everyone.’
“Empowering exhibitionism” seems to be an acknowledgement that if one chooses to express oneself online through multiple channels, this is a form of identity creation and self expression and therefore the user becomes empowered through exhibitionism. Albrechtslund cites Koskela in noting that “by exhibiting their lives, people claim copyright to their own lives” – though this is not the case. The construction of an online presence, as shown by the beginning of Albrechtslund’s article, is subject to replicability. Personal information may be lifted, adapted, placed in new contexts and reft of its original meaning. If anything, the concept of copyrighting one’s own life by publishing on line is exactly the opposite of what Albrechtslund proposes – what we’re ultimately left with is the sacrifice of identity as a tradeoff for a stake in the participatory process. Albrechtslund’s own mention of the employee who lost his job because a friend shared his information online (who was also friends with his employer) speaks directly to this.
Maybe it’s difficult for me to wrap my head around the conflicting positions embedded in this essay, or maybe it’s that Albrechtslund was too good in his opening salvo wherein he defined the problems and sacrifice that the exhibition of one’s online presence presents. Maybe it’s too many episodes of “To Catch a Predator” under my belt, and knowledge of the really scary ways that social networking sites are used. I know that there are many, many positive attributes of these sites, but the minute I start employing theory with them, I get freaked out. This doesn’t mean that I’m not going to join Facebook (again, the ultimate hurdle for me) – it does suggest, however, that I might do so closer to the end of the semester.
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