We're all (on) Big Brother now

Unlike most surveillance (done by recording cameras but largely ignored unless needed) and dataveillance (done by impersonal algorithms and not scrutinized in terms of individuals), social surveillance is mostly done by individual people on other individuals, and so can seem legitimately creepy. Most people feel some anxiety about what they put online getting into "the wrong hands." Are these people slightly paranoid, assuming (maybe secretly hoping) that the world is more interested in them than it actually is? Criminals, stalkers, employers, and - for young people - parents are usually the individuals people are most worried about having access to social surveillance. Maybe we should add in teachers here, too!

If you are worried by all this, I do encourage you to take a deep breath and think it through more carefully and rationally. Do I honestly have more power over you if I know you ate at McDonalds four times last week or secretly listen to Justin Bieber? I suppose your social media information could get you in trouble under certain circumstances - many professors have been dragged online by students who forgot they were social media "friends" with that very same professor, resulting in some potential tension, for instance. Verbum sat.

The tools are there for anyone who has power over you (however modest) and who has it in for you. Let's say you email me and say you are sick and can't do your class presentation this week. Suppose I suspect you are lying. What if I were nefarious enough (and had the time!) to go look at your Instagram story (assuming it's public) and I then saw you posting there a picture of yourself having beers with friends during the time you were supposed to be in class and supposedly home sick?

What if someone made it easier to do cyberstalking like this? What if they created an automated tool that would provide quick amassed social media information for all the major platforms about anyone we ever interact with, socially or professionally? I see no reason why someone couldn't write software that agglomerates people's freely available social media activity and makes it available in summary form for a fee. (Rumour has it that you can pay hackers on the Dark Web to do this kind of detective work for you.) What if employers and potential employers had this kind of software, sold to them as a product like the "data brokers" sell our online sales and browsing profiles to companies that want them for marketing purposes? Such a tool would make it possible for employers (or teachers, parents,the police, banks and loan institutes, hospitals, any authority you might like to circumvent) to quickly see what you are doing with yourself, as reflected in your online activities.

(Incidentally, just so you know, I can tell when you go onto the Blackboard site for this class, what pages on Blackboard you have accessed and when and for how long; but I honestly don't make use of that feature. Usually. ;-) I come from an age more respectful of privacy, and maybe also more sympathetic to attempts to circumvent authority.)

So, potentially inimical private individuals - parents, teachers, employers, and so on - can sometimes, if they really want to, invade your privacy through social surveillance.

But will they bother? And isn't the risk worth it to you, when it's so important that your friends and "admirers" know what you are doing, and that you continue to exist and have a voice and a face in The Spectacle that so many of us spend so much of our waking lives in now, the Internet?

Isn't it more concerning for many of us to wonder if perhaps no one actually knows (or cares) whether you ate at McDonalds last week or not? Are we starting to think we only exist as public presences, virtually, online, in the hyperreality of media representation? We want to be media, not flesh and blood.

Privacy schmivacy

In a penetrating discussion of some of these questions - a discussion that shows a more "millennial" ambivalence toward the pervasive recording and self-recording of the world today - Emily Taber talks about the technological panopticon as a more democratic and participatory kind of spectacle that people voluntarily give up their privacy to be a part of:

Based on the concept that privacy and social participation are conflicting desires, social participation is winning out. Despite the clamor to preserve privacy, when another interest is at risk most people don’t care enough to value their privacy (Gotlieb 1996). People are now accustomed to watching and being filmed, having their credit card purchases recorded, and even enjoying the loss-of-privacy in the process. They are less inclined to fight against it because it is no longer “imposed on a group by outsiders” as Bentham’s panopticon was, making it much harder for “members of the group [to] in principle mobilize and oppose it” (Mowshowitz 1996). In the panopticon’s eye, “us” and “them” change too fluidly for a strong resistance to form.

In contrast to Kietzmann and Angell's anxieties that the technologies will be used to fine or incarcerate us, Taber points out how this new kind of mutual surveillance is actually de-criminalized - though it is still of course full of cruelty and castigation of a more "village" sort: "the subject of a YouTube video titled 'Chubby Ninja Kid Falls Off Roof!!' was not doing anything illegal. There is no longer any discretion: both deserving and undeserving alike are subjected to the gaze of the public." People don't use the technology to blow the whistle on lawbreakers, but rather in random acts of public shaming for entertainment!

Taber also draws attention to the fact that rather than necessarily enforcing conformity, as Orwell's Big Brother and Bentham's prison would have, the modern panopticon often rewards people who diverge from the norm with viral celebrity:

I do not necessarily argue that our neo-panoptic habits are used as a social mechanism to keep one another in line. The new system actually offers some benefits for being a deviant, which is something that is set up in direct contrast to Bentham’s model. There have been both solitary people and groups who have gained digital recognition from doing outrageous things with the knowledge that someone nearby has a camera.

Yet in spite of her useful tweaks of the "more 20th century" kind of argument Kietzmann and Angell were making elsewhere in 2012, Taber winds up with some of the same kinds of concerns as they had: that all this watching and being watched is mostly oppressive, or "violent" at times, partly because people seem to be crueller in the virtual world than in the physical one (think trolls and bullying):

Being digitally omnipresent has led to understanding the risks of being both the watcher and the watched and has in turn changed the digital empathy. The new social patterns and simulacratic morals suggest that few people care about how their observations are impacting others; they don’t empathize so much with victims as victimize them further. For average persons, there is little interest in understanding how the neo-panopticon is impacting those around us. This doesn’t render neo-panopticism ineffective; rather, it shows that there is just as much pleasure in punishment now as ever, and one of the only effective ways to cope with surveillance is to become a part of it.

Taber's focus on the frequent meanness of social media reminds me of the remark I often make to my own friends who are obsessed with their public image on social media ("Why didn't you like my post?!"): Facebook is just high school by other means. What Taber is showing us is that, in the new world order, the average global villager doesn't need to collude with a totalitarian government to oppress their neighbour - they can do it themselves by posting a video to YouTube. We can call each other out on "misdeeds" on any number of free public platforms, whether those misdeeds be serious crimes, lies to our boyfriends, or just outright fails that make us look bad.

It might even be suggested that as the amount of old school government surveillance has increased in the real (physical) world we have become better behaved there, while in the unregulated and only socially monitored hyperreal world of online we often behave appallingly. The problem is that there are real people behind the avatars and public images, and our unbridled violence toward them online has real impacts. Unlike real-world bullying, we don't actually see the effects of our actions, so we can consider them somewhat unreal, just like casualties of smartbombs.

The abiding dangers of surveillance for human freedom and progress

Many people argue that you shouldn't mind having your business known if you aren't doing anything wrong. But "wrong" is a pretty question-begging concept. Freedom fighters in South Africa were doing something "wrong" by the terms of their government and its laws. If you're gay today in Nigeria or Russia, you're doing something "wrong." Do we really want the government and other powerful institutions - or even society at large - to be able to follow our every move, for our own "protection"? The power an evil government or corporation or secret organization would have over us if it did have complete knowledge of all our activities in our physical and virtual villages is genuinely terrifying and seems all too likely to be possible in the near future.

And beyond such nightmare scenarios, do you even really want to be fined for every time you're illegally parked? Do you really want a world where your boss can find out you weren't actually sick yesterday, let alone a world where a girl can kill herself because of online bullying? That is the kind of surveillance world we now live in. It's not 1984; or if it is, we have become Big Brother.

Does anyone still crave privacy and is privacy even still a possibility? Or is that a thing of the past, for better or worse, and are we all focused on publicity now?

Critics like Taber, Radke, Kietzmann and Angell are not completely happy with this post-privacy world. They worry that we may not fully have realized it yet, but that 1984 just came a few years later than expected, and it was brought to you in part not by a totalitarian regime, but by the technology most of you love and largely live within: Google, Facebook, Instagram, and the rest.