America's Next Top Information Professional

Ahhhh, the panopticon. Who doesn’t love it, or at least love talking about it? I remember first reading a chapter or two from Foucault as an undergrad in Jim Kincaid’s legendary Thematic Option course on deviance. (This would’ve been, incidentally, about the same time that I first joined facebook.)

Now, in my LIBR 559M course at UBC, we’re turning our eyes to surveillance in social media. In this article, Anders Albrechtlund discusses “participatory surveillance,” where folks use online social networking to maintain friendships and otherwise empower themselves. He makes some intriguing points, but first I need to take issue with some relatively minor details.

The first is a misrepresentation of the potential for digital preservation. Albrechtlund states, “It is said that true friendships last forever, however, in the case of online social networking this sentiment gets a completely different meaning. The digital trails of an online friendship – true or not – really do last forever, since they are stored indefinitely on servers.” Although this may be the best thing to think before you post a scandalous photo to your blog, the fact is, plenty of digital information gets lost. Who owns those servers Albrechtlund mentions? Maybe the company will go under. Maybe the servers will crash. Maybe the program used to access that data will fall into disuse. Casual statements like Albrechtlund’s perpetuate a false sense of security that digital information is effortlessly permanent. The effort and money put into projects like InterPARES, LOCKSS and the ERA are proof that digital records and information are not necessarily as long-lasting as we would like.

Next. In discussing danah boyd’s work on social networkings, Albrechtslund mentions searchability, stating that, “The almost instant access to things the searcher is looking for does make a difference compared to the slow process of “digging out” what he or she wants to find.” Woah woah woah. Certainly many kinds of searching are much faster and easier online, but again this misrepresents the state of the information universe. Some kinds of information remain buried in databases or archaic language or on paper. Research will always require a certain amount of “digging out,” whether that means flipping through a card catalog OR evaluating a gazillion hits from Google. While it is important to celebrate the successes of online searching, it is imperative to think critically about what has not been and perhaps cannot be retrieved online.

Combined, these two misconceptions present a world where all information about you is accessible to anyone, forever. No wonder some view the online realm as a panopticon, a tool for social control.