{"id":10976,"date":"2012-07-19T08:00:17","date_gmt":"2012-07-19T12:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=10976"},"modified":"2013-01-27T06:22:13","modified_gmt":"2013-01-27T10:22:13","slug":"a-new-privacy-part-3-documentary-consciousness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2012\/07\/19\/a-new-privacy-part-3-documentary-consciousness\/","title":{"rendered":"A New Privacy, Part 3: Documentary Consciousness"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Documentary consciousness entails the ever-present sense of a looming future failure.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In Part I<\/a> this essay, I considered the fact that we are always connected<\/em> to digital social technologies, whether we are connecting<\/em> through them or not<\/strong>. Because many companies collect what I call second-hand data<\/em> (data about people other than those from whom the data is collected), whether we leave digital traces is not a decision we can make autonomously. The end result is that we cannot escape being connected to digital social technologies anymore than we can escape society itself.<\/p>\n

In Part II<\/a>, I examined two prevailing privacy discourses to show that, although our connections to digital social technology are out of our hands, we still conceptualize privacy as a matter of individual choice and control. Clinging to the myth of individual autonomy, however, leads us to think about privacy in ways that mask both structural inequalities and larger issues of power.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In this third and final installment, I consider one of the many impacts that follow from being inescapably connected in a society that still masks issues of power and inequality through conceptualizations of \u2018privacy\u2019 as an individual choice. I argue that the reality of inescapable connection and the impossible demands of prevailing privacy discourses have together resulted in what I term documentary consciousness<\/em><\/strong>, or the abstracted and internalized reproduction of others’ documentary vision<\/a>. Documentary consciousness demands impossible disciplinary projects, and as such brings with it a gnawing disquietude; it is not uniformly distributed, but rests most heavily on those for whom (in the words of Foucault) \u201cvisibility is a trap.\u201d I close by calling for new ways of thinking about both privacy and autonomy that more accurately reflect the ways power and identity intersect in augmented societies.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Impact of Documentary Consciousness<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Always maybe watching.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Just before the turn of the 19th<\/sup> century, Jeremy Bentham designed a prison he called the Panopticon<\/a>. The idea behind the prison\u2019s circular structure was simple: a guard in a central tower could see into any of the prisoners\u2019 cells at any given time, but no prisoner could ever see into the tower. The prisoners would therefore be subordinated by this asymmetrical gaze: because they would always know that they could<\/em> be watched, but would never know if<\/em> they were <\/em>being watched, the prisoners would be forced to act at all times as if they were being watched, whether they were being watched or not. In contemporary parlance, Bentham\u2019s Panopticon basically sought to crowd-source the labor of monitoring prisoners to the prisoners themselves. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Though Bentham\u2019s Panopticon itself was never built, Michel Foucault used Bentham\u2019s design to build his own concept of panopticism<\/em>. For Foucault, the Panopticon represents not power wielded by particular individuals through brute force, but power abstracted to the subtle and ideal form of a power relation<\/em>. The Panopticon itself is a mechanism not just of power, but of disciplinary power<\/em>; this kind of power works in prisons, in other types of institutions, and in modern societies generally because citizens and prisoners alike, aware at all times that they could be under surveillance, internalize the panoptic gaze and reproduce the watcher\/watched relation within themselves by closely monitoring and controlling their own conduct. Discipline (and other technologies of power) therefore produce docile bodies<\/em>, as individuals self-regulate by acting on their own minds, bodies, and conduct through technologies of the self.<\/p>\n

Foucault famously held that \u201cvisibility is a trap<\/a>\u201d; were he alive today, it is unlikely Foucault would be on board with radical transparency.<\/strong> Accordingly, it has become well-worn analytic territory to critique social media and digital social technologies by linking to Foucault\u2019s panoptic surveillance. As early as 1990, Mark Poster argued that databases of digitalized information constituted what he termed the \u201cSuperpanopticon.\u201d Since then, others have pointed out that \u201c[even] minutiae can create the Superpanopticon<\/a>\u201d\u2014and it would be difficult to argue that social media websites don\u2019t help to circulate a lot of minutiae.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Even minutiae can create the Superpanopticon.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Facebook itself has been likened to a digital panopticon<\/a> since at least 2007, though there are issues both with some of these critiques and with responses to them. The “Facebook=Panopticon” theme emerges anew each time the site redesigns its privacy settings\u2014for instance, following the launch of so-called \u201cfrictionless sharing\u201d<\/a>\u2014or, in more recent Facebook-speak<\/a>, every time the site redesigns its \u201cvisibility settings<\/a>.\u201d Others express skepticism, however, as to whether the social media site is really what I jokingly like to call \u201cthe Panoptibook\u201d; they claim that Facebook\u2019s goal is supposedly \u201cnot to discipline us<\/a>,\u201d but to coerce<\/em> us<\/em> into reckless sharing (though I would argue that the latter is merely an instance of the former).<\/p>\n

Others point to the fact that using Facebook is still \u201clargely voluntary<\/a>\u201d; therefore, it cannot be the Panopticon. \u2018Voluntary,\u2019 however, is predicated on the notion of free choice, and as I argued in Part I<\/a>, our choices here are constrained; at best, each of us can only choose whether or not to interact with Facebook (or other digital social technologies) directly. Infinitely expanding definitions of \u2018disclosure\u2019 notwithstanding, whether we leave digital traces on Facebook depends not just on the choices we make as individuals, but on the choices made by people to whom we are connected in any way. For most of us, this means that leaving traces on Facebook is largely inevitable, whether \u201cvoluntary\u201d or not.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Looks like someone has a case of documentary vision!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What may not be as readily apparent is that whether or not we interact with the site directly, Facebook and other social media sites also leave traces on us<\/em>. Nathan Jurgenson (@nathanjurgenson<\/a>) describes \u201cdocumentary vision<\/a>\u201d as an augmented version of the photographer\u2019s \u2018camera eye,\u2019 one through which the infinite opportunity for self-documentation afforded by social media leads us not only to view the world in terms of its documentary potential, but also to experience our own present \u201cas always a future past.\u201d In this way, \u201cthe logic of Facebook<\/a>\u201d affects us most profoundly not<\/em> when we are using Facebook, but when we are doing nearly anything else. Away from our screens, the experiences we choose and the ways we experience them are inexorably colored not only by the ways we imagine they could be read by others in artifact form, but by the range of idealized documentary artifacts we imagine we could create from them. We see and shape our moments based on the stories we might tell about them, on the future histories they could become.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I argue here, however, that Facebook\u2019s phenomenological impact is not limited to opportunities for self-documentation. More and more, we are attuned not only to possibilities of documenting, but also to possibilities of being documented.<\/strong> As I explored in Part I of this essay, living in an augmented world means that we are always connected to digital social technologies (whether we are connecting to them or not). As I elaborated in last month\u2019s Part II<\/a>, the Shame On You<\/em> paradigm reminds us that virtually any moment can be a future past disclosure; we also know that social media and digital social technologies are structured by the Look At Me <\/em>paradigm, which insists that \u201cany data that can be shared, WILL be shared<\/a>.\u201d Consequently, if augmented reality has seen the emergence of a new kind of \u2018camera eye\u2019, it has seen as well the emergence of <\/strong>a new kind of camera shyness<\/strong><\/a>. <\/strong>Much as Bentham designed the Panopticon to crowd-source the disciplinary work of prison guards, Facebook’s design ends up crowd-sourcing the disciplinary functions of the paparazzi<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Camera shy.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Accordingly, I extend Jurgenson\u2019s concept of documentary vision\u2014through which we are simultaneously documenting subjects and documented objects, perpetually aware of each moment\u2019s documentary potential\u2014into what I term documentary consciousness<\/em>, or the perpetual awareness that, at each moment, we are potentially the documented objects of others. <\/strong>I want to be clear that it is not Facebook itself that is “the Panoptibook”; knowing something about nearly everyone is not nearly the same thing as seeing everything about anyone. Moreover, what Facebook \u2018knows\u2019 comes not only from what it \u2018sees\u2019 of our actions online, but also from the online and offline actions of our family members, friends, and acquaintances. Our loved ones\u2014and our “liked” ones, and untold scores of strangers\u2014are at least as much the guard in the Panopticon tower as is Facebook itself, if not moreso. As a result, we are now subjected to a second-order asymmetrical gaze:<\/strong> we can never know with certainty whether we are within the field of someone else\u2019s documentary vision, and we can never know when, where, by whom, or to what end any documentary artifacts created of us will be viewed.<\/p>\n

As Erving Goffman elaborated more than 50 years ago, we all take on different roles in different social contexts. For Goffman, this represents not \u201ca lack of integrity<\/a>,\u201d but the work each of us does, and is expected to do, in order to make social interaction function. In fact, it is those individuals who refuse to play appropriate roles, or whose behavior deviates from what others expect based on the situation at hand, who lose face<\/em> and tarnish their credibility with others. The context collapse<\/a> designed into most social media therefore complicates profoundly even the purposeful, asynchronous self-presentation that takes place on such websites, which has come to require \u201claborious practices of protection, maintenance, and care<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Attempting the impossible.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When we internalize the abstracted and compounded documentary gaze, we are left with a Sisyphean disciplinary task: we become obligated to consider not just the situation at hand, and not just the audiences we choose for the documentary artifacts we create, but also every future audience for every documentary artifact created by anyone else.<\/strong> It is no longer enough to play the appropriate social role in the present moment; it is no longer enough to craft and curate images of selves we dream of becoming, selves who will have lived idealized versions of our near and distant pasts. Applying technologies of self starts to bring less pleasure and more resignation, as documentary consciousness stirs a subtle but persistent disquietude; documentary consciousness haunts us with the knowledge that we cannot be all things, at all times, to all of the others that we (or our artifacts) will ever encounter. Documentary consciousness entails the ever-present sense of a looming future failure. <\/strong><\/p>\n

As I discussed in Part II<\/a>, the impacts of these inevitable failures are not evenly distributed. Those who have the most to lose are not people who are \u201cevil\u201d or who are \u201cdoing something they shouldn\u2019t be doing,\u201d but people who live ordinary lives within marginalized groups. Those who have the most to gain, on the other hand, are people who are already among the most privileged, and corporations that already wield a great deal of power. The greatest burdens of documentary consciousness itself are therefore likely to be carried by people who are already carrying other burdens of social inequality.<\/p>\n

Recent attention to a website called WeKnowWhatYoureDoing.com showcased much of this yet again. The speaker behind the \u201cwe\u201d is a white, 18-year-old British man named Callum Haywood (who\u2019s economically privileged enough to own an array<\/a> of computer and networking hardware), who built a site that aggregates potentially incriminating Facebook status updates and showcases them with the names and photos of the people who posted them. Because all the data used is \u201cpublicly accessible via the Graph API,\u201d Haywood states in a disclaimer on the site<\/a> that he \u201ccannot be held responsible for any persons [sic<\/em>] actions\u201d as a result of using what he terms \u201cthis experiment\u201d; he has further stated that his site (which is subtitled, \u201c\u2026and we think you should stop\u201d) is intended to be \u201ca learning tool<\/a>\u201d for those users who have failed to \u201cproperly [understand] their privacy options\u201d on Facebook.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Not everyone thinks Facebook’s privacy settings are easy to understand.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Coverage of the site\u2019s rapid rise to popularity (or at least high visibility) was similar to coverage surrounding Girls Around Me: a lot of Shame On You<\/em>, and the occasional critique that stopped at \u201ccreepy<\/a>.\u201d Tech<\/a>–savvy<\/a> white<\/a> men<\/a> thought the site was great; a young white woman starting college at Yale this fall explained that her digital cohort\u2014\u201cthe youngest millennials, the real Facebook Generation<\/a>\u201d\u2014has learned from the mistakes of \u201cthose who are ten years older than us.\u201d As a result, her generation thinks Facebook\u2019s privacy settings are easy, obvious, and normal; if your mileage has varied, \u201cyou have no one to blame but yourself.\u201d In examining the screenshots from WeKnowWhatYoureDoing.com that these articles feature, I have yet to find one featured Facebook user who writes like a Yale-bound preparatory school graduate; unlike the articles\u2019 authors, the majority of featured Facebook users in these screenshots are people of color. It is hard to see WeKnowWhatYoureDoing.com as doing anything other than offering self-satisfied amusement to privileged people, at the acknowledged potential expense of less privileged people\u2019s employment.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Even overlooking the facts that Facebook\u2019s privacy policy may be \u201cmore confusing and harder to understand<\/a> than\u00a0the small print coming from credit card companies,\u201d and that the data in Facebook\u2019s Graph API<\/a> is really only \u201cpublicly accessible\u201d in reference to a \u2018public\u2019 comprised entirely of software developers, the story Haywood wants to tell with WeKnowWhatYoureDoing.com is fundamentally flawed. It is a story in which \u201cpeople violate their own privacies<\/a> on a regular basis,\u201d in a world where digital surveillance, companies like Facebook, and smug self-important software developers fade into the background of the setting\u2019s \u2018natural\u2019 world. Haywood states, \u201c[p]eople have lost their jobs in the past due to some of the posts they put on Facebook, so maybe this demonstrates why<\/a>\u201d; what he seems to be missing is that his site demonstrates not only \u201cwhy,\u201d but how<\/em> people come to lose their jobs.<\/p>\n

In pretending that \u201cinformation wants to be free\u201d and holding individuals responsible for violations of their own privacy, we neglect to consider the responsibility of other individuals who write code for companies like Facebook, or who use the data available through the Graph API, or who circulate Facebook data more widely, or who help Facebook generate and collect data (yes, even by tagging their friends in photographs). If we cannot control our own privacy, it is because we can so easily impact the privacy of everyone we know\u2014and even of people we don\u2019t know.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
We need to take a new look at “privacy” and “autonomy.”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We urgently need to rethink \u2018privacy\u2019 in ways that expand beyond the level of individual conditions, obligations, or responsibilities, yet also take into account differing intersections of visibility, context, and identity in an unequal but intricately connected society. And we need as well to turn much of our thinking about privacy and individual autonomy on its head.<\/strong> Due justice to questions of who is visible, and to whom, to what end, and to what effect cannot be done so long as we continue to believe that privacy and visibility are simply neutral consequences of individual choices, or that such choices are individual moral responsibilities.<\/p>\n

We must reconceptualize privacy as a collective<\/em> condition, one that entails more than simply \u2018lack of visibility\u2019; privacy must be also a collective responsibility, one that individuals and institutions alike honor in ways that go beyond \u2018opting out\u2019 of the near-ubiquitous state and corporate surveillance we seem to take for granted. It is time to stop critiquing the visible minutiae of individual lives and choices, and to start asking critical questions about who is looking, and why, and what happens next. <\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Whitney Erin Boesel (<\/em>@phenatypical<\/em><\/a>) is a graduate student in Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Looming storm photo by Whitney Erin Boesel. Used with permission.<\/em><\/p>\n

Digital eye image from http:\/\/www.indypendent.org\/2012\/04\/28\/facebook-lobbies-washington-spying-users<\/a> <\/em><\/p>\n

Store surveillance image from http:\/\/mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl\/2010\/10\/30\/facebook-open-minded-panopticon\/<\/a> <\/em><\/p>\n

Stick figure comic by Luke Simpson, from http:\/\/www.stickworldcomics.com\/comics\/2009\/11\/<\/a> <\/em><\/p>\n

Camera shy photo by M1L4N, from http:\/\/m1l4n.com\/camerashy\/<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Impossible task image by Hyeyoung Kim, from http:\/\/www.co-mag.net\/2008\/dark-word-hyeyoung-kim\/<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Facebook traffic sign photo from http:\/\/epicfails.net\/2011\/10\/facebook-fail\/<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Facebook gunshot image from http:\/\/www.buzzingup.com\/2010\/09\/facebook-is-infected-by-the-failwhale\/<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

New look image by Kyle Froman from http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/tobias\/2011\/10\/starting_over.html<\/a> <\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Part I this essay, I considered the fact that we are always connected to digital social technologies, whether we are connecting through them or not. Because many companies collect what I call second-hand data (data about people other than those from whom the data is collected), whether we leave digital traces is not a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1875,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967,892],"tags":[4195,2324,9227,18300,10682,942,2142,1902,424],"class_list":["post-10976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-essay","tag-anxiety","tag-augmented-reality","tag-autonomy","tag-documentary-consciousness","tag-documentary-vision","tag-facebook","tag-michel-foucault","tag-panopticon","tag-privacy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10976","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1875"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10976"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10976\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14168,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10976\/revisions\/14168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}