After reading the excerpt from Viktor’s Mayer-Schönberger’s “Delete : the virtue of forgetting in the digital age”, I wondered if I ought to delete my last post, Hacktivism, which isn’t terribly racy or radical, but ponders on how companies in the Security Software & Services Industry have an incentive to characterize any efforts – no matter how benign – of hactivists as a threat to America, and particularly, as a threat to you directly that only their software (for only $39.99, or bundled with a collection of other tools that you likely will never use for only $59.99) can protect you from. But this is America, where we have rights and can pretty much say what we like. Right?
Part of the point of ‘delete’ is that there is no way we can know how our actions today, in terms of posting pictures, videos, or personal opinions, could be held against us in the future. Indeed, the phrase in the Miranda Warning that starts, “Anything you say can and will be used against you”, could be modified to read “Anything you say, have ever said, or posted, including pictures, videos, links and random rants, can and will be lifted from its original context, reframed in the worst possible manner and used against you over and over and over again.”
Websites like the Wayback Machine, part of the Internet Archive Project, collected “over 150 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago.” So, even if I chose to delete my brief exploration of hacktivism, it may already be captured somewhere. If at some point in the future some individual/group/institution wishes me ill, they may find it and twist bits of it into some narrative about me that might do me harm.
Guin talks about our control society in “Edited Clean Version: Technology and the Culture of Control”, and I can’t help but think about the fact that the internet gives us a sort of license, via easy to use technologies, to freely express ourselves. But, given the discussion in ‘delete’, our freedom of expressions of today may result in our reduced freedom tomorrow. And perhaps this is just a lesson that we, as a society, have yet to learn. Guin talks about license as mechanism though we which gain both freedom and a responsibility for self-regulation. So, for example, we are given a driver’s license, which gives us the freedom to drive but comes with a requirement that we know, and will abide by, the laws of the state that govern behavior on the road. I remember being 15 years old and wondering how it is that all of the drivers on the multi-lane freeway by and large seemed to be behaving well even though they could –they had the freedom too – randomly cross over lanes and drive poorly. People generally self-regulate in exchange for freedom.
So, given our license to easily self-express, how will the fact that anything we post can and will be used against us affect how or if we self-regulate? That could be where the ‘superpanopticon’ comes in. Perhaps people will start posting only safe topics and the promise of the internet as a venue for free expression of ideas will, over time, wither.
Your version of the Miranda rights is terrifying.
When I was growing up, I was a pretty good kid. It seemed when I got in trouble, written word betrayed me. For the longest time, I couldn’t figure out how my mother knew my sister and my every action. Turns out she is not a mind-reader, only a diary reader. My sister’s diary betrayed our every move.
With that realization, the journalist in me died; No more of the daily dairy spilling my thoughts. Apparently the rights to privacy do not extend to my parent’s house in Alabama. I lived by a new motto, never write anything down you wouldn’t want published in the newspaper. From then on, every time a teacher or professor assigned the task of keeping a journal, I sighed, groaned, and panicked. I must admit, even participating in this blog made me nervous. And now, I know my initial apprehension was warranted!
The articles this week made me realize how much the internet really has and will change our lives. I believe our actions have already (and will continue) to be self-regulated. The examples in both Unedited and Delete all made me stop and think about what it means to use the internet as a free speech platform. I thought the example of the professor being denied access to the US for admitting using LSD years earlier in a journal article was particularly striking. Especially since he published his article in print and it was probably digitized without his permission or possibly awareness.
With the advent of social media and technologies like camera and video phones, must we always behave as though we are being watched? Should this be any different from how we would have behaved anyway? Are the same behavioral norms from my job now expected at happy hour lest someone post a video of me enjoying an undisclosed beverage, and someone later denying me a job, or worse my PhD because I am not fit to be a professor?
Ya know, the flip side is that users can post from their cell phones to blogs and flickr and such, meaning it can be harder, for example, for police to justify police brutality. So no only are we as citizens watched, but perhaps / hopefully, institutions are watched too.