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| | | -- By SylvieRampal - 03 Mar 2009 | |
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< | The Bogeyman is Watching (for your own good).
Orwell’s Big Brother bogeyman and the inhumane convenience of Huxley’s Brave New World have arrived. The current landscape is surreal in the abstract, and very much like science fiction: In the name of convenience and information gathering people are electronically surveilled. They are hounded by “sensors that record identities and the times and places of transactions” , “satellite navigation system[s] …pinpoint exactly where…[people are] on the planet” , and a general “convergence of many commonplace electronic devices and networks that collect information about [the citizenry]” . | >
> | People are so obsessed with innovation and modernity that they spend little time assessing the costs. The ubiquity of surveillance sprang more from ‘innovations’ in convenience—the credit card, the transport pass, the mobile—than from fear or the desire for governmental encroachment. People are not apathetic, they have simply struck bargains for convenience-sake. But in so doing, they have not bettered quality of life. They have unfettered themselves from the weight of liberty and human dignity, not just tedium and drudgery. | | | | |
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< | The Digital Self as a Threat to Privacy and Personhood
The data revolution has changed identity—expanded how the private self can be monitored and recorded. The “practical terms of our identities are defined by ‘data elements’ . . . Social Security numbers and addresses . . . mothers’ maiden names . . . the things we buy . . . the way we use our credit cards” . The feared communist tyrannies of the past have fallen, but in their wake a new democracy has emerged; one which, aided by commerce, can know the very thoughts of its citizens and in knowing them, (because to know is to control) control these thoughts and those who hold them. In the end, “[t]he Controllers realized that force was no good”. In the same way that Huxley’s dystopia changed what it meant to be human—by eradicating the human struggle and thereby eliminating human dignity—so too does this surveilled world change the notion of personhood: what is inherently our own, what pieces of ourselves do we own and which no one can appropriate, what right do we have to be let alone. | >
> | The commmodification of self and the general unveiling that surveillance imposes are not just threats to the vague idea of privacy but more fundamentally to who we are as people, as individuals. What is at stake is not a distant ideal that seems apart from who we are in our daily lives. What is at stake is our human-ness: how we choose to define ourselves—composition, mechanisms of communication, disclosures. The hidden self (our secrets, who we are in private) is a necessity not a luxury; the ‘self’ is defined in part by relationships and autonomous self-disclosure is indispensable to building the trust and intimacy relationships require; information-filters used to ascertain what is true help create our personal realities. Perhaps viewing that which imperils the constellations of privacy—secrecy, autonomy, anonymity—as imperiling personhood, ‘self’, may help illuminate the bargain for convenience. | | | | |
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< | Curtain-ripping
Privacy is the life-blood of distinct personhood. What freedom exists in a world that demands, by the denial of privacy, that our private and public selves be the same, that doesn’t allow us the privacy to more fully develop our core self and inner realities. In Testaments Betrayed, Kundera says, “the real scandal was not Prochazka’s daring talk but the rape of his life …private and public are … two essentially different worlds and …respect for the difference is the indispensable condition, the sine qua non, for a man to live free. . .the curtain separating these two words is not to be tampered with… curtain-rippers are criminals”. | >
> | Secrecy. The hidden self—Tampering with the “curtain” between public and private life. | | | | |
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< | The relationship between the citizenry and government has changed. The surveillance, curtain ripping, that was experienced and perceived in totalitarian societies is far less than what is now present in the American democracy. Those societies judged what you said and did, ours (by way of data mining and data profiling) can predict and measure what you think and will do. People are transformed from person to data, from “subject to object”. | >
> | Freedom cannot exist in a world that demands, by the denial of privacy, that our private and public selves be the same. Unifying the private and the public eliminates the separateness needed to fully develop the core self and inner-life. In Testaments Betrayed, Kundera says, “the real scandal was not [] daring talk but the rape of [] life …private and public … two essentially different worlds”, and that “respect for the difference is the indispensable condition,[] for a man to live free”. The hidden self creates protective stasis—offering calm and respite from exposure to the chaos of modern life. When we return from the exertions of socialization—e.g. the requirements of public masks, the variety of selves we must be to adapt to different circumstance and context—the hidden self, the private life, comforts and relieves. | | | | |
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< | The Self as Defined by Intimate Relationships
Surveillance destroys intimacy and lessens personhood. Privacy is essential to the development of emotional trust and intimacy and individuality. It is upon these things—trust, intimacy, uniqueness—that relationships are built; absent them and relationships will remain unborn. We come to know ourselves in the formation of relationships; they define who we are. These relationships are built on shared experience and by the choices we make as to whom and how we reveal ourselves—our past, our traumas, our hopes and dreams. How can any relationship we have be more special and closely bonded than another in a world where the revelation of our selves is not made by choice? Where for the right price we can be known by anyone? | >
> | Autonomy. Self-disclosure of inner-life.
Relationships—family, romantic, and friendship ties; affinity groups; political organizations—and the roles that are created through them are important elements of identity and human-ness. Relationships teach us appropriate behavior, respect for others, how we are distinct from others, and separates us from “others”. Behavior and uniqueness formed by relationships are responsible for the conformity and non-conformity choices we use to self-distinguish. | | | | |
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> | Additionally,the choice of how, to whom, and to what degree we self-disclose evidence our trust in those who are privy to our disclosures, and the rarity of the disclosure fosters intimacy. Relationship building requires both trust and intimacy. But the loss of privacy makes revealing what is hidden from public view involuntary and non-discretionary. How can any relationship we have be more special and closely bonded than another in a world where the revelation of our selves is not made by choice? Where for the right price we can be known by anyone? | | | | |
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> | Fragmentation of self as failure in self-representation
Reducing people to data elements makes them less human and more object-like. Using data to define identity shifts control away from the individual—third party electronic diaries supplant the self-created life-narrative. Data centered representation fragments and re-arranges ‘self’ in ways that seem inauthentic and inconsistent with self-image. Separating certain consumer behaviors (the purchase of a certain book) from the whole of a person (daughter, pro-environment, choir singer, science fiction-loving, Temptations-listening) makes the ‘self’ context-less. Finally, the recognition of ‘self’ is divorced from actual reality— relegated to digital reality. | | | | |
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< | The Personal Narrative: The Stories We Tell Ourselves and Others About Our 'Selves' | >
> | Anonymity.
The diary that each person keeps of their personal history, their personal narrative, is how they perceive and define their ‘selves’. Bernstein argues that “anonymity enables the exploration of unconventional aspects of the self without fear of retribution”. But anonymity does not merely facilitate identity creation, it is itself a part of identity. If anonymity may be labeled as a state of being unnamed, unknown, invisible, it might also be called the preservation of self. In that, in the digital world those who are known, named, or visible are owned (at least in part) by those who know, name or see them. It is to this facet of personhood that O’Harrow is speaking, when he says “the details about our lives . . . belong to the companies that collect them” . When people are reduced to data elements, loss of anonymity is loss of self. | | | | |
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< | The diary that each person keeps of their personal history, their personal narrative, is how they perceive and define their ‘selves’. Bernstein argues that “anonymity enables the exploration of unconventional aspects of the self without fear of retribution”. But anonymity does not merely facilitate identity creation, it is itself a part of identity. If anonymity may be labeled as a state of being unnamed, unknown, invisible, it might also be called the preservation of self. In that, in the digital world those who are known, named, or visible are owned (at least in part) by those who know, name or see them. It is to this facet of personhood that O’Harrow is speaking, when he says “the details about our lives are no longer our own. They belong to the companies that collect them, and the government agencies that buy or demand them” . When people are reduced to data elements, loss of anonymity is loss of self, of our personal narrative and autonomy in creating it. “Our lives are being recorded . . . [i]t is [as if] all of these electronic diaries are being kept by different people”, but “we have no control over the diaries, and we can’t even know what they say about us” . | | | | |
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< | Reducing people into data elements fragments identity and threatens to define the whole of a person by only a portion or singular facet of their identity. An article on AOL Searcher No. 44177490 , aka Thelma Arnold, said: “Her searches are a catalog of intentions, curiosity, anxieties and quotidian questions” that even occasion to “betray intimate emotions and personal dilemmas”. Personhood is the right to be let alone in these thoughts and emotions. | | | | |
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< | Seeing the Loss of Ownership and Autonomy
Ownership of the self--how the self is defined, represented, and constructed--has changed. The collection of personal data and data mining have made personhood salable and made the self knowable to outside parties in unprecedented ways. The cost to society is a loss of individual autonomy. As a result, the elements of personhood are diminished. As privacy and autonomy narrow, people feel less secure in the construction and representation of personhood. Society must question the impact of these changes: perhaps some changes can be accommodated after a period of adjustment, but we cannot know which or how until society assesses the nature of cultural changes that have taken place. | >
> | Derealization:
Digitization of media and emotional perception.
Compassion for social pain—pity, sympathy, empathy—requires additional processing: “the time course of the neural process in the anterior insula is slower than for compassion pertaining to physical pain” . Compassion demands longer periods of emotional attention than is commonly paid to media (e.g. news reports, social networking sites). Indeed, a clinical study reports that “[t]he rapidity and parallel processing. . . which hallmark the digital age, might reduce the frequency of full experience of such emotions”. Finer emotions like compassion, admiration, empathy that are so much a part of our human-ness—how we relate to and value the lives others—are, potentially, eroded.
Information filtering institutions and identity.
For some people everything they see and hear is translated through the context or lens of religion. Nationality may act similarly. Americans are deeply invested in the idea of civil liberty as an element of ‘American-ness’. So, the loss of privacy undermines the credibility of the institutions we hold dear, forever changing truth/ reality perception. Loss of institutional credibility imbues the statement, “They hate us for our freedom” with irony. There is a sense that in the wake of tyranny, a new, invidious, and suspect “American democracy” has emerged; one which behaves in ways antithetical to our national identity. | | |
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