On privacy and self in a networked era
JA
November 11
In a recent article in the New York Review of Books, Zadie Smith expressed her discomfort with social media, most particularly Facebook, and the harm she believes it has caused to a generation’s worth of communication:
When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. … Connection is the goal. The quality of that connection, the quality of the information that passes through it, the quality of the relationship that connection permits—none of this is important.
Smith is without a doubt a great writer – persuasive, sharp and erudite, but, like many critics of the whole social media phenomenon, I can’t help but feel that she is looking at the issue from the wrong way round, comparing apples to oranges and finding them lacking, so to speak. Yes Twitter and Facebook can sometimes be ugly – filled with bit-sized commentary that is dull, rude, bigoted, boring or self-indulgent, full of #firstworldproblems, LOLs and bad grammar. And yes they can be exactly otherwise – witty, caring, funny, intelligent, radical, observant and all the variations that come in between. This is because social media is more a less a reflection of ourselves. Like art, like literature, like film and TV, it contains a myriad of ways of being. As Alexis Madrigal points out in the Atlantic Monthly:
It’s key to Smith’s reasoning that Facebook implicitly creates more opportunities for people to say maudlin, ugly, or otherwise silly things. But we’ve been expressing ourselves in ways like that forever.
I suspect perhaps that the unease with this form, and worries about what it is doing to our ‘generation’, comes first and foremost from disappointment with what we are seeing, rather than any intrinsic faults with the programs themselves. Take for example the ABC’s popular Q&A, which runs a live, onscreen twitter feed with each episode. The producers have been heavily criticised for deciding to combine the digital with such a ‘serious’ television program. An editorial in The Australian called the tweets ‘dunny door graffiti of the digital age, adding precisely nothing to the sum of human knowledge’, while comments on another opinion piece (in support of the stream) blasted them as ‘shallow’, a ‘dumbing down’, ‘pathetic’ and ‘banal’. Now some of the tweets may be just that (just as others may be equally smart, sharp and enlightening), but is this to do with the form, or rather the people behind it? And is it such a bad thing that we are confronted with it? I think the decision to incorporate Twitter on Q&A is a fascinating one – in effect, it is an exercise which transports the everyday lounge room into the public arena. Conversations, jokes and thoughts once shared on the couch are now on air. It can be comforting to know that I might share opinions with others out there in the digital ether, or disturbing to realise just how deep some prejudices run.
More than that though, the stream is a great example of how TV and social media can work in tandem. Q&A is a perfect test drive – the format of the show itself (audience to panel) replicates, to an extent, the many-to-many set-up found most commonly online. We all know that connections and conversations are the slick fuel on which the Internet runs and the combination of Twitter plus Q&A taps into exactly. Ratings have risen continually since the stream was first introduced – with tweets numbering up to 17 000 when John Howard was on, and 35 000 for Tony Abbott during the election.
In the NYRB, Smith also expresses a certain nostalgia for ‘a kind of person who no longer exists. A private person, a person who is a mystery, to the world and—which is more important—to herself’. This is another source of unease in the digital era – that nothing is private anymore. From Madrigal:
Smith wants to say, “You are who you appear to be on Facebook.” But who believes that of themselves or anyone else? She makes the drastic overstatement only to serve as her grounds for outright rejection of the service. Facebook, the way I see it, is an API to your person.
Anything posted on Facebook or Twitter is more likely to be an edited, filtered version of yourself, rather than the you that bares all. Social networking is certainly very public and very open, but nonetheless it is still a form of narrative. Our Twitter handles and Facebook profiles carefully crafted characters – they are our aspirational selves, selective autobiographies in 140 characters or less – and as such can never be said to be a complete loss of privacy. James Bradley made a similar observation about blogging a while back:
… [W]hatever else it is, online writing is still about inventing versions of the self, whether as pleasing personas, disguises or simply creations to be deconstructed and analysed, and as such needs to be understood within a critical framework capable of making sense of the complexities of that process.
Finally, while I mentioned above that social media was closer to reflection of everyday life, I do want to be wary of over-romanticising this notion, because just as our profiles are filtered, so too are our feeds. I suppose it would be closer to say that social media is a selected reflection of everyday chatter – influenced by algorithms and searches. Wired, for example, recently conducted an interesting informal experiment into what kind of behaviour gets you into the Facebook newsfeed (answer: lots of comments, likes, links and photos). Equally, Q&A chooses the tweets that appear on TV in a somewhat ad hoc fashion – they pick a random ‘bucket’ to review, and narrow this down further for a senior producer, who finally gives the go-ahead regarding what shows up on screen.
I’m going to leave the last word to one Helen Garner, whose brilliant essay on the self in fiction we’ve republished in the current anniversary edition. Perhaps this is a long bow to draw, but I was struck re-reading the piece just how closely the present discomfort with social media is reflected in old worries about memoir and private selves. And also how strongly the desire to connect exists, both now and then.
The intimate involves other people. But where do I end and other people begin? I once went on holiday to Vanuatu. There I saw a row of tall trees across the tops of which a creeper had grown so hungrily and aggressively that it had formed a thick, strangling mat: the trees were no longer individuals, but had become part of a common mass. I found this spectacle strangely repellent. It filled me with horror. But the older I get … the more I am obliged by experience to recognise the interdependence of people.
How inextricably we are intertwined! We form each other. We form ourselves in response to each other.
Meanland: Reading Without Privacy
The final Meanland event for 2010 will feature critic Alison Croggon, Drum editor Jonathan Green, Jeff Sparrow and Sophie Cunningham on the murkier aspects of life in a network era – has this broken down the distinction between our public and our private lives? What are the rules for writing in forms that are so intimate and entirely open? Do we Tweet as ourselves or as representatives of our employers? And is new media helping us work differently or just work harder? Chaired by Michael Williams.
When: Tuesday 16 November, 6:15pm-7:15pm
Where: The Wheeler Centre, 176 Little Lonsdale Street, Melbourne.
This a FREE event. Bookings recommended.
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Comments
11 Nov 10 at 20:12
It’s sort of tangential, but if you grew up in a country town or lived in a small community you are less likely to feel nostalgia for the good old days of privacy because the days of privacy never existed for you anyway.
I know that’s not exactly what she’s talking about when she talks about privacy, but I find it hard to bemoan the fact that in the days of social media everyone knows everything about everyone else, because in some places everyone always did.
It’s all completely fascinating though…thanks for all the links I’m really enjoying reading all those pieces.
...12 Nov 10 at 12:02
I think you’re right in that the fundamental thing that Zadie Smith is assuming is that what we put out there on the Internet is the totality of our real selves. for most, that’s not even close to true. Not even for those like myself that write blogs, and tweet like mad.
It’s true that a lot of people are still learning which lines are okay to cross in terms of that sharing of one’s self, and it’s especially true that parents will have to, y'know, parent their kids with regards to social networking. But I think we all have an intrinsic knowledge of what we do and don’t want to share of our selves, and I think we self-censor, or at least self-obscure, most of the time.
Obviously there is still the matter of certain websites not making it easy to delete your personal data, and that will be cleared up eventually. There’s only so long you can hide behind a EULA. But ultimately, people are giving to these networks because they want to. And the person they are giving is almost certainly not going to be the person they really are.
Very thought-provoking post, Jess (and one that has given me a kernel of an idea for a story-so double thanks).
...13 Nov 10 at 12:25
Yes that’s good point – how you perceive privacy in the digital context probably has a lot to do with what you’re used to on a day-to-day basis.
Phill – self-obscuring is a good way to put it. I think this definitely a big part of communication online. And there are certainly issues to do with eg. FB changing their privacy settings, or trying to trick users into revealing more by making the options more complicated. That’s probably a whole other kettle of fish, although it was interesting to note that there was enough backlash on the blogs etc that FB was eventually forced to address this, which perhaps indicates that social networking does really rely on a certain kind of edited self-image. Hope all goes well with the story!
...14 Nov 10 at 12:56
I do admire Zadie taking a a strong anti-FB stand. the thrust of her argument was based on a book by Lanier – We Are Not Gadgets – and these meta-ideas (FB parenting for a generation?) are important to an otherwise quiet debate about the future of society and technology (will the Google geeks finally rule the world?). Looking forward to seeing the final Meanland event on the Internet.
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