john st. unignorable - Blog the book of john

Nicole,

I think that there are really two choices that individuals can make to limit elements of their "private" social media lives from spilling out into a public forum:

1. Be conscious of your social footprint

And by footprint, I mean what you post. The easiest way to not get brought into the back room by airport security is to NOT make a joke about carrying a "bomb" in your contact lens solution. Not that this is a new phenomenon. There's also the drunken pictures from Cabo in 2007 when you accidentally made out with a lesbian dressed as Santa Claus that should be scrubbed from the internet so that a future employer could never see you at that stage of your life.

2. Choose your "friends" closely

But if you want a certain social media platform to champion all of your drunken moments and irreverent thoughts, there could be a different approach. Think about trimming down your friends list to people who are actually your friends. People who wouldn't rat you out. More specifically, people who are not your boss. There's always LinkedIn for that.

As for the public shaming on blogs, that's near impossible to control.

- Christian

Hey Christian,

Both of those are great suggestions, but managing privacy shouldn't be the answer to fear of surveillance.

The danger I see is that, if this type of behaviour starts to become increasingly acceptable, despite both of those efforts, you could still land in hot water. The danger isn't just when you post something something people should never have seen - a drunken photo, a comment about performing an illegal activity, which should already be something people manage carefully. The danger starts to be that things that seem to be trivial - a relationship status, your sexual orientation, a joke taken out of context - could suddenly take on a whole different meaning depending on with whom that information is sent. And who decides what should/shouldn't be seen? Sure, a drunken makeout with a lesbian Santa Claus in Cabo seems like an obvious one to not post, but what if there are just a few photos of having a beer on a patio, and my friend decides because there are 3 of those photos, I'm an alcoholic and sends it to my employer because they think I need help?

Essentially, you would start to monitor not only what you post, but what you do, based on fear of the surveillance of those around you. It could even be that a well-meaning friend shares that information not knowing the consequences it might have.

Increasing privacy shouldn't be the answer, because that opens the door to a very dangerous territory.

Nicole

I disagree that people will stop sharing as a result of potentially incriminating themselves or exposing (otherwise) private matters. The digital world, and social media in particular, has made such personal exposure ubiquitous, and it's getting to a point where you would have to essentially remove yourself from the public realm in order to avoid it. And, conversely, if you do not remove yourself and do not behave according to certain laws that become public knowledge, you can be forcefully removed from society (prison, being the prime example here).

Think about it this way: If we were aware that all of our actions could potentially be under surveillance, whether that be by the state or our community, would we not adjust our behaviour in order to behave appropriately within both of these spheres? Extreme generalization, I know, but there is an aspect of socialization at hand here that I believe is actually beneficial for the community and for individuals functioning within it.

Ask Michel Foucault. He'll draw you a Panopticon, high five Jeremy Bentham and tell you what's up.

....

I've been drinking.

Sister Katie - of course it's the Panopticon. The point of the Panopticon is that you not only stop performing criminal actions, but non-criminal actions as well. Tsk tsk Foucault was critical of the Panopticon, you should know better than to reference it as a positive thing. How much, exactly, have you had to drink ;)

Well I would argue that Foucault's idea of discipline in society and "internalizing the gaze" is not necessarily a negative thing, unless that society has undergone some form of trauma. Think, the state of Germany in post war depression, and the discourses of power that ensued to normalize mass genocide.

However, had social media existed at the time and Nazi's were under the surveillance of the international community as opposed to that of their superiors, it would be an entirely different narrative.

Anyways, we could argue about this forever. And it could get quite heated.
And then I would have to unsister you. And unfriend you on Facebook.

Bringing the Nazis into this is a poor argument. The Nazis weren't under the surveillance of the international community because the international community willingly turned a blind eye, and social media wouldn't have changed that. The danger of internalizing the gaze isn't that it stops us from performing criminal actions, which I've agreed is positive, it's that it prevents you from performing non-criminal actions within an arbitrary standard of what's right and wrong, one determined by your friends and not the law.

There was actually a severe lack of presence of the Holocaust in international media on its onset. And, the ones who did know that something "might" be going on didn't know what to do until what was actually happening broke out in the media and public pressure was applied.

But anyways, I don't mind if my friends and community have an influence on my actions and behaviour. SOMEONE'S got to keep me in check... The world is my life coach, evidently

Well you, my dear, are a special case :)