Today’s entry on privacy features Bruce Schneier’s article “The Eternal Value of Privacy,” which ran in Wired News in May of 2006.

I said in my last entry that I am going to withhold critical commentary on these different figurations of privacy.  I am forcing myself to stick to that promise.  Well, I’m saying that out one side of my mouth, but out of the other I’m saying that Schneir’s article contains a number of alarm-inducing words, phrases, & claims :  “inherent human right,” “human condition,” &, especially when referring to lives the framers of our Constitution lived, “You ruled your own home. It’s intrinsic to the concept of liberty.”

I’ll leave it at that; you can let your own, lil’ imagination run wild with sociologically informed critiques of Schneier’s logic.

That said, Schneier’s article is interesting in that it offers no explanation or justification for the use of surveillance.  The Big Brother State video begins with the logic of those who use (& celebrate) strategies & technologies of surveillance.  Schneier does not entertain that logic.

Moreover, Schneier quickly dismisses the notion that the protection of privacy is about “hiding a wrong.”  No, privacy is an inherent human right; the dignity of the human condition is dependent on the protection of privacy.

Schneier attempts to situate the debate about privacy within American Constitutional history.

A future in which privacy would face constant assault was so alien to the framers of the Constitution that it never occurred to them to call out privacy as an explicit right. Privacy was inherent to the nobility of their being and their cause. Of course being watched in your own home was unreasonable. Watching at all was an act so unseemly as to be inconceivable among gentlemen in their day. You watched convicted criminals, not free citizens. You ruled your own home. It’s intrinsic to the concept of liberty.

Does the historicization of privacy contradict Schneier’s claim that privacy is inherent or intrinsic to anything?  Perhaps, but that’s another post.

I think that the important development in Schneier’s article is in his concluding remarks.  The debate about privacy should not be had in terms of security versus privacy, but privacy versus control.  Why?  Well, this gets to the heart of why Schneier believes privacy matters.

Without privacy, individuals become

children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that — either now or in the uncertain future — patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.

The surveyed individual, or the potentially-surveyed individual, becomes compliant - first, briefly halting & considering whether there was somebody there, watching, but then quickly laughing about his paranoia.  Later, though, perhaps our demeanor changes.  & then freedom flees . . .

Convinced?

A) Yes
B) No
C) Maybe so

Please circle one and then discuss.

EP

Recently, a friend asked me to explain why privacy matters. That’s the question, right, on which a critique of surveillance must be built?

In response to that question, I intend to use the next few entries here to offer a (non-critical, at least initially) summation of what others out there, including bloggers, journalists, and a few wayward Supreme Court Justices, have to say about privacy & surveillance.

I start with Big Brother State’s well produced, though largely atheoretical, animation on surveillance.

In the video, surveillance is explained in two ways.

The first figuration is associated with politicians “assigned to security matters today,” who might, if you’d ask them, justify surveillance technologies and techniques as integral strategies of crime deterrence and prevention. Closed circuit camera systems, it seems, win over the hearts and minds of would-be criminals. Trusted computing keeps the nasty internet-transmitted-diseases off your computer. And police surveillance of emails and phone calls allows the cops to catch the bad guys.

“It would probably all sound great, because the idea is that you should start thinking of these techniques as cream of the crop. But let’s face the not quite so obvious, but nonetheless omnipresent downside of all this.”

Public cameras allow police to keep a database of “all of your” (read: anyone’s) movements.

Airline securities - record keeping on passengers & biometrics - allow the secret services of many nations to produce records of all passengers. These records could potentially include “explicit” information, including eye color, fingerprints, and a “high-resolution picture of your face,” all of which is “information you would usually expect to be taken from suspected criminals.” (You’re not a suspected criminal, are you? Because if you are…)

Trusted computing prevents the computer user from deciding what programs should be installed on their own machine.

Finally, and most dramatically, the police could potentially access your emails and phone calls to obtain information … that you, well, might not just want them to access, namely your sexual relations. (The sexual relations are left unspoken, but implied through animation.)

In the film’s conclusion, these forms of repressive law, justified by the “public fear of terror,” are symptomatic of Western society’s transformation into a police state.

Convinced?

(a) Yes
(b) No
(c) Maybe so

Please circle only one, then discuss.

Note : What follows should NOT be considered a definitive or accurate depiction of ANT.  I finished reading Latour’s Reassembling the Social today and am still ruminating on it.

What can ANTs tell us about online surveillance?

Literally, nothing.  In a stylized dialog with a graduate student, Bruno Latour tells the confused, probably overworked graduate researcher that actor-network-theory (ANT) does not apply to any case study or research site or sociological concern.  Later, Professor Latour comments

Surely you’d agree that drawing with a pencil is not the same thing as drawing the shape of a pencil.  It’s the same with this ambiguous word: network.  With Actor-Network you may describe something that doesn’t at all look like a network – an individual state of mind, a piece of machinery, a fictional character; conversely, you may describe a network – subways, sewages, telephones- which is not all drawn in an ‘Actor-Networky’ way.  You are simply confusing the object with the method.  ANT is a method, and mostly a negative one at that; it says nothing about the shape of what is being described with it.  (Latour 2005:142)

Latour’s introduction to ANT, Reassembling the Social, contributes to social theory and to method, but at the end of the (occasionally baffling, occasionally brilliant) text I know nothing substantive about what world the ANT researcher should constuct.  This is what Latour means when he says that ANT is “mostly a negative” method.  ANT’s concepts are socially voided; though agent and network and “plug-in” mean something within the method they are not (supposed to be) maps of the social world. For example, (and to brutalize ANT), a network is as big or small as it is.  This approach forgoes a priori definitions of group size or micro and macro “forces.”

What I find most useful about ANT is that it vacuums up the social; in other words, it offers an alternative method of sociology that does not assume that social structures, social constructs, or social forces dilly-dally behind interactions.  It is strange for me to celebrate a sociological method that kills off the social.  After all, I just spent days on an email conversation with friends arguing about the social construction of knowledge and perception. 

Thing is, I largely agree with Latour when he writes that the mobilization of a social explanation of a phenomena largely obscures that actual practices involved in the making of that phenomena. 

This does not mean that we are all free, rational individuals radically uninvolved with this thing that used to be called the social.  Latour actually describes us as puppets, but he means it in the best of ways.  Actors – which are both human and non-human – are involved (caught?) in a web of relations with other actors.

It is all very interesting and I’d like to get to know ANT better, but I want to focus on in this entry is a exchange between the Professor of ANT (P) and the graduate student (S) on the topic of the visible and invisible.

S : But what about invisible entities acting in some hidden ways?
P : If they act, they leave some trace.  And then you will have some information, then you can talk about them.  If not, just shut up.
S : But what if they are repressed, denied, silenced?
P : Nothing on earth allows you to say they are there without brining in proof of their presence.  That proof might be indirect, farfetched, complicated, but you need it.  Invisible things are invisible.  Period.  If they make things move, and you can document those moves, then they are visible.
S : Proof?  What is a proof anyway?  Isn’t that terribly positivistic?
P : I hope so, yes. What’s so great about saying that things are acting whose existence you can’t prove?  I am afraid you are confusing social theory with conspiracy theory – although these days most of critical social science comes down to that.  (2005:150)

To be clear, Latour does not deny the existence of ghosts and their brethren.  He implores social scientists to count an actor’s accounts of events, actions, motives, including those informed by spectral forces … say God or the ghost of some influential theorist.  The catch is that that ghostly actor has to leave a trace.  Sociologists are not allowed, when using ANT, to presume the presence of a structure, a false consciousness, etc., that hides behind the actor.

Which brings me to surveillance.  As I note in my previous entry, I’m beginning to consider the questions and sites and methods with which I can construct a dissertation.  I like what ANT does to the social, would like to know it better, &, perhaps, would like to use it in (not apply it to!) my research. 

In The Simulation of Surveillance, William Bogard writes that

Since earliest times, the exercise of surveillance has been dependent on masking. […] At the same time, masks are precisely what surveillance strips from its object.  Surveillance, we shall see, is all about breaking through surfaces of appearance, closing gaps between appearance and reality, practices which themselves demand stealth, deception, and attention to controlling appearances.  (1996:20)

So what can ANT do with actors who, by definition, mask, if not actually erase, the proof of their presence? 

All I can come up with so far is :

Beginning with the actors - FaceBook users or bloggers, for examples – the ANT researcher can initially ignore the question of what the surveyor is doing.  However, rather than assume that the invisible presence of a marketer, or the invisible presence of a university administrator, is internalized by the web user, who reflexively acts in accordance with that internalized observer, the ANT researcher can pay attention to how that web user acts within a collective of blogs and bloggers, computers, private and public spaces, articles that s/he does or doesn’t read on internet privacy, knowledge of those surveyors, etc. 

The ANT researcher might find … and if s/he does find it, is forced to accept that … the observers out there, even if nefarious or authoritative, are not part of certain web users’ collectives.

If that is the case, does that mean surveillance is impotent or doesn’t matter?  No, but it would mean that we cannot assume, despite coming-to-age with Foucault’s panopticon or Orwell’s Big Brother, or, even, Goffman’s presentation of self, how surveillance matters.

Maybe.  I think I have probably fumbled ANT & its concepts pretty badly.  But it’s a start, huh?

EP

It has only been a few days since I last posted, but my scaredy-cat city has gone berserk. This time, though, we’ve managed to keep the lunacy in the newspapers. Yes, this time, we color our fears with smudges of printed ink, rather than with that peculiar Mooninite glow.

What the heck am I talking about?

T H I S :
2.21.2007 : The Boston Phoenix : Facing off over Facebook : Who’s Looking at You, Kid?
2.23.2007 : The Boston Globe : Beware the land minds in new media
2.25.2007 : The Boston Globe : Managing your online persona becomes a key career skill

Consider yourself warned, I guess : watch your back, etc : because someone’s coming for you.

It seem to me that this coverage represents something of a backlash to the popularity of Web technologies - FaceBook & MySpace, in particular. More than that, though, it seems to signal a backlash to the indifference Web users have about the ways that the information : their online personas, etc : can be accessed, used, & used to incriminate them.

I’m reminded of Jackie Orr’s genealogy of panic disorder, in which the sociologist pays attention to the production of panic during the Cold War. No doubt Orr’s analysis is of a situation more dire : maybe, closer to our Y2003 duct-tape panic : than this current panic web . . . s i t u a t i o n we’ve got our selves into, but that doesn’t disqualify the comparison.

I don’t have my copy of Orr’s book around : nope, it’s in Minnesota : but my memory of her chapter on the Cold War, “‘Keep Calm’ for the Cold War: Diary of a Mental Patient” goes something like this : armed with only the meager technologies of the media & real bombs, dropped on some simulated Anytown, U . S . A., our politicians & military men waged a battle for the our psyche, which was : most of the time : politically indifferent to mushroom clouds & other doomsday imagery. During a cold War, this indifference was a liability . . . was evidence that the threat-from-Out-There wasn’t understood; so through all sorts of scare-tactics, the federal government attempted to mold a bold, new citizen : prepared for the worst-case-scenario, but, through the processes of preparation, fixated on the severity of the scenario.

Now, while I acknowledge the gap in severity : a bad resume ain’t nothing like a mushroom could : it’s time to bring this back to the Web.

It seems that we have an indifferent population, that’ll say what it thinks & mean what it says & will give out all sorts of incriminating evidence online, no matter the consequences. & this population isn’t panicking, isn’t holding back, isn’t, to paraphrase one of the classics, bothering all that much with the presentation of the online self in their everyday, online lives. Perhaps, as the two Boston Globe articles suggest, this is a population that wants to live with (not in) a past : that doesn’t want to play some game of cultural amnesia, forgetting all the messy loose ends.

So if we need some order, if we need to (re)consolidate the voices that matter, why not watch them where it hurts : make moves on their attempts to acquire an education (see the Phoenix article) & a job.

& so it goes, so it goes : . . .

As for young people who are increasingly on the Internet side of this cultural divide? Parents, it’s 11 p.m. Do you know where on the Internet your children are — and what they are doing to mess up their resume? Follow the cybertrail.

EP

A The Lives of Others - ” the best surveillance movie since The Conversation,” according to one reviewer - showed up at my local theatre. This means two things. Firstly, I have to rent, borrow, or thieve a copy of The Conversation. Secondly & obviously, I’ll sit in on a showing of The Lives of Others one of these days.

The posters that my theatre is using to advertise this film includes two lines : “Nothing is private” & “Nothing is sacred.” The implication, I suppose, is that the sacred happens in private; & the violation of the private is a violation of the sacred. This is driven home by the images the poster employs : a rather drab&serious authority-type juxtaposed with the cool flesh&desire of the protagonist & his girlfriend.

Of course, the film is more than the poster & I haven’t yet seen the former, so my skepticism about the claim : “Nothing is private. Nothing is sacred.” : is aimed more at the notion that the presence of a well-protected border between public & private is only desirable than it is at The Life of Others.  It seems to me that a more robust discussion of what it means to exist visibly, in both public & private, would yank these distinctions, as well as the notion of surveillance, out a field that frequently conceptualizes the visible person as citizen, employee,  consumer, or child & the gazer as an official, employer, market researcher, or pedophile.

Anyway, I’m confused.  You’d think that the critiquing surveillance would be easy, but to avoid the “doom & gloom” position without finding oneself on the side that shouts about how great technology is & how perfectly adorable all this user-generated content is requires some finesse.

EP

Four days after offering up “Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy,” New York Magazine gives us this (intentionally) mis-titled piece :
“Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Internet Exhibitionists.”

“Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy” posited that the Web habits of children, teenagers, & 20-somethings erode the (illusionary) border between private lives & public spectacle.   But this is a double-border : or so the article’s story goes : between these spaces & between child & the parent.

Kids today. They have no sense of shame. They have no sense of privacy. They are show-offs, fame whores, pornographic little loons who post their diaries, their phone numbers, their stupid poetry—for God’s sake, their dirty photos!—online. They have virtual friends instead of real ones. They talk in illiterate instant messages. They are interested only in attention—and yet they have zero attention span, flitting like hummingbirds from one virtual stage to another.

Enter the toy-makers, who can hook parents up with all sorts of filtering & surveillance devices that can keep the bad things out : namely, the pedophile : but, according to the authors of “Mama, Dont’ Let Your Babies…” can’t (yet) get at what seems to really be irking parents  :

But, still, we can’t help wondering what the point is. Isn’t it just a matter of time till these kids are showing themselves off to the world, anyway?

&, still, I can’t help wondering what the point is.  Isn’t one of the concerns that youngsters already enjoy the allure of the audience & spectacle of the Web?  So why add another audience?

Now, I know it’s one thing to have an audience of online friends & another to have a parent (or teacher) watching.  But, according to “Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy,” even the meaning of that difference is diminishing.

Yeah, I am naked on the Internet,” says Kitty Ostapowicz, laughing. “But I’ve always said I wouldn’t ever put up anything I wouldn’t want my mother to see.”

&, anyway, don’t these toys just accelerate the erosion of the private? & confuse that  erosion with play?

EP

What has it been, an hour or so or so, since I outlined some of the claims about new media that are circulating in the blogosphere?

(Everytime I use that word - blogosphere - I can’t help but feel a little guilty. I know Swarming Media blogs on wanting to off the word, but I haven’t had a chance to read that entry yet. I do get a sense, though, that the most popular of the terms used to describe blogs, social networking sites, user-generated content, etc. are quite imperfect, sacrificing the diversities of the Web for the simplicity of catch-alls.)

It has only been an hour or so, yes : well, perhaps three, perhaps six before this is posted : but I want to spend some time considering the last claim about surveillance.

From that entry : 4) Democratic surveillance doubles back onto the users. It’s no longer a matter of few surveilling most, but all surveilling all.

Nathan @ Swarming Media has written on vision & the panopticon in two entries at his blog. The two - Seeing and Being Seen & The New Self-Regulating Subject - fit together rather coherently. Hopefully, I can sum them up here without doing significant damage to Nathan’s writing.

(Note to the reader : Yup, right now, I rely heavily on Swarming Media : that’s because that blog is so damn good.)

It seems to me that the heart of Swarming Media’s take on panopticism is articulated in “The New Self-Regulating Subject.”

Though it at first seems contradictory, I would argue that panopticism has become distributed, especially within social networks. While the fictive gaze of the central guard in the panopticon is what holds prisoners in their self-regulating states, it is now the fictive gaze of the masses. Look at MySpace, Facebook, del.icio.us, and blogs. We place and leave constructed bits of ourselves out there to be viewed by the multitude while at the same time we participate in the social game of the regulating gaze: each process informing the other. Our engagement in the act of the gaze also places us in the position of the spectacle. Imagine, perhaps, a panopticon that instead of having a central tower, were to give each of the prisoners binoculars so they could watch each other. Suddenly distributed panopticism is starting to look like distributed spectacularity.

The components of this statement recur in “Seeing & Being Seen” : distribution (& decentralization) of the panopticon; “identity traces,” which are left in other users’ (conceptualized both as a multitude of others & an other / swarm of the multitude) fields of visibility; & participation in a mass regulation of others’ identity traces. The sum of these components is put succinctly in another Swarming Media entry:

If the disciplinary society was defined by the controlling individual / controlled mass duality, then this new control society is defined by the reversal of that duality: the controlling mass / controlled individual.

It occurs to me that this entry might read like a Very Short Introduction to swarmingmedia.com. So I’ll try to move on. But before I do, one final thought on the imagery of this version of surveillance, especially that of prisoners-with-binoculars. What’s clever about this image is that it accounts for the appropriation of the means of surveillance to (re)view the activities of those authority figures who like to hang around the panopticon. You know, the ones who used to do all the watching. At the same time, it accounts for the decentralization & multiplication of fields of visibility, which makes possible the “controlling masses.”

If this reading of Web panopticon is correct, then efforts to enforce centralized surveillance & control on the Web is regressive; it is as if policy-makers interested in controling Web use are relying on architectural designs ill-suited for the Web.  (Thanks to Doc Searls for this link on McCain’s proposal to create a national database of illegal images.)

Professor James Doyle of Duke University observes something happening in the transformation from Bentham’s model to the one outlined by Nathan. Indeed, Doyle might call this transformation a slippage; not that power decreases, but that our capacity to see power as power diminishes when the panopticon becomes decentralized.

If the first conclusion of this study is that the state may actually have more power than the digerati believe, the second conclusion is that the attractiveness of technical solutions stems not simply from the fact that they work, but that they apparently elide the question of power — both private and public — in the first place. The technology appears to be “just the way things are”; its origins are concealed, whether those origins lie in state-sponsored scheme or market-structured order, and its effects are obscured because it is hard to imagine the alternative. Above all, technical solutions are less contentious; we think of a legal regime as coercing, and a technological regime as merely shaping — or even actively facilitating — our choices.

Technological solutions : think filtering software, site “ratings,” etc : (this article dates from 1997) : does not signal the end of power & the liberation of the end-user, free to choose which privacy & security devices to use. It involves something more complex : the “hardwiring” of power - sometimes state power - directly into the “technologies of freedom.”

Ten years later, it seems that Swarming Media contributes an update to Doyle’s work. Doyle was largely concerned with the seepage of the state into technology; Nathan might be arguing that the Panopticon has seeped into the design of this new Web . Seeped, I say, because the architecture has changed, but the effects seem to be more or less the same.

I mean, who needs John McCain, ISP surveillance, & messy debates about privacy, what constitutes obscenity, & the reality of digital depictions of bodies when volunteerism - code or some Net-savvy boys - will do the work for you.

EP
PS : I’m not as down on visibility as I sound. I swear. I’ll get to that & the pleasures of visibility some other day.

I have surveillance on my mind; my mind is a mess.

What I mean is that I’m considering : ruminating on, you know? : competing claims & competing (stories about) realities of surveillance & technology : a few of which come from some very articulate bloggers. What I mean is that I have a handful of knotted hyperlinks & a short stack of books, footnoted, in a small room. Not to mention an empty blog in which I can try to talk to myself about this.

(Familiar with the White Stripes’ ditty “Little Room”? It occurs to me that these new Web technologies are helping us solve the timeless dilemma Jack White poses in that song;

“Well you’re in your little room /and you’re working on something good /but if it’s really good /you’re gonna need a bigger room /and when you’re in the bigger room /you might not know what to do /you might have to think of / how you got started sitting in your little room.”

Here I am, in a small cluttered room, feeling a little squashed by the stack of articles at my feet, the print&bound editions books at my elbows. But - ah! - I found out about RSS feeds, & RSS readers, & my del.icio.us - & things are beginning to clear up. I may never have to leave this little room after all. But all this is beside the point.)

: COMPETING CLAIMS :

My knowledge & understanding of the claims being made about social import of user-generated content is partial, in more than one sense of the word. (1) I can’t claim “ethnographic authority” in the composition of these claims; I have been reading blogs & blogging for a little over a month now. & (2) I’m involved in a sociology department that emphasizes power-reflexive methods; such reflexiveness will, you can probably guess, position me on a particular half of the continuum of optimism/pessimism about the social uses & effects of the Web.

That said, the competing claims, as I see them this afternoon, go a little something like this.

(1) Web 2.0 democratizes public discourse.

This is the most optimistic narrative about Web 2.0. The basis for this optimism is the explosion of access to &, following from that, participation in the media. It is this understanding of new media that Time magazine expressed when it named “You.” its Person of the Year; You, the magazine claimed, were busy during 2006 “seizing the reins of the global media,” “founding and framing the new digital democracy,” and “working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game.”

(2) The democratization of the media democratizes democracy.

Tiara.org cleverly points out that Americans don’t live in a direct democracy, so this claim really means that “political participation” increases in “meaningful ways.”

Evidence? :

• Jennifer Earl, Director of the Center for Information Technology and Society at the University of California at Santa Barbara, contends that the Web both facilitates offline protest & replaces it, becoming a venue of activism. (Thanks to Doc Searls for this link.)
• Politicians might just be more afraid of bloggers than they are of Catholics!
  
• The accessibility of technologies of surveillance allows for the surveillance of authority.

There are smart & important discussions of the types of democracy that emerge from the Web : see, for example: tiara.org’s skepticism & Swarming Media’s hyper-democracy. Specifically, though, the final claim about surveillance is what interests me most. It’s at this point that I notice the turn from optimism to pessimism.

(3) Democratic surveillance is no democracy at all.

In a previous post, I cite William G. Staples thoughts on this. They’re worth repeating here, since they’re exemplary.

Interestingly, as the case of the Rodney King beating illustrates, we can even use these devices to ‘turn the tables’ on those who abuse their position. Some have argued that this signals the democratization of surveillance, offering ordinary citizens the power to challenge authorities. Yet, this strikes me as a contradiction in terms. A democratic society ensures and protects everyone’s personal privacy, elites and commoners alike; it does not facilitate universal visibility. (2000:155)

Of course, simply because access to surveillant technologies increases does not mean that the uses of it are equalized. Again, tiara.org’s blog is informative; the promise, she writes, of Web 2.0 to provide filtered, personalized content is tethered to “behavioral marketing” practices. (In my imagination, my meandering entry on Cymfony & data mining buttresses tiara.org’s concise critique of this marketing strategy.)

This kind of surveillance seems benign - a perfection, of sorts, of marketing techniques that we’ve already accepted; Staples, in fact, refers to it as “soft” surveillance. This doesn’t signal the end of “harder” forms of surveillance; surveillance that seeks to uncover deviance & wrong-doing continues. &, given the ambiguities about standards of decency & obscenity & given the breakdown of a strict difference between real & fantasy : what constitutes real, digital child pornography, for example? : & given the diversification & saturation of technologies, these forms of surveillance frequently expand their “field of visibility” in order to increase their efficiency.

(4) Democratic surveillance doubles back onto the users. It’s no longer a matter of few surveilling most, but all surveilling all.

According to Swarming Media, participatory media generates a new, self-regulated self.

According to me, a critique of contemporary surveillance must account for the pleasures derived from mass participation in it.

& it’s on this : the pleasures of surveillance : that I’ll conclude this entry : GPS shoes make people findable : because find-ability is safe-ability : the dream of a perfect visible :

EP

It’s true.

(1) YouTube helped keep George Allen out of office.
(2) When Michael Richards exposed his inner racist, cell phone video was there.

&, (3) more recently, Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports wonders what might have happened to high school basketball phenom OJ Mayo’s rep had hand held & cell phone cams not recorded his (non-) confrontation with a high school ref.

Specifically, Wojnarowski writes

Once, the wire story would’ve shaped the public’s perception of that strange high school scene in West Virginia. America’s best high school basketball player would’ve been framed as something of a punk, what with him getting ejected for trash talking, chasing down an official and knocking him on his fanny and all.

The highest and mightiest would’ve wagged those fingers with a “Tsk, tsk, tsk,” toward a system that creates these holy teenage terrors, and O.J. Mayo’s reputation would’ve been shot to hell.

Only, the truth didn’t come out through the West Virginia Secondary School’s Activities Commission’s spin, or game referee Mike Lazo’s dubious reporting of events. Through the footage of hand-held cameras and video phones uploaded onto the Internet since Friday’s game between Huntington and Capital high schools in Charleston, this turns out to be a different day of truth-telling in sports.

This time, the kid isn’t so easily boxed up and stereotyped.

This time, the grownups had to be accountable for behavior, too.

Wojnarowski spin on “what-could-have-been” sounds pretty believable to me. Mainstream sports coverage does a god-awful job keeping sane & speaking sanely about African-American basketball players. (I’m not going to rehash this here; see Sports Media Review’s excellent blog for a discussion of media coverage of African-American basketball players.)

& Wojnarowski is probably correct : thanks to those handheld cams, as well as to the ease with which those videos can be uploaded & shared, OJ Mayo’s rep hasn’t suffered much in light of this incident. &, given the content of the video, that seems fair.

But is this it? A better democracy because we’re watched better?

If it was, perhaps we could take those lovable YouTube guys to their favorite bars, purchase them a drink, & thank them. Mission accomplished, you know?

But consider that Slate.com’s Michael Agger calls camera phones “the gadget that perverts, vigilantes, and celebrity stalkers can all agree on.”

(Somewhere in the recesses of his Orwellian paranoia, Agger hears Foucault whispering that Panopticon is the gadget that the curious, the child, the philosopher, and the pervert can all agree on.)

Then there’s Willam G. Staples lamenting in Everyday Surveillance

Interestingly, as the case of the Rodney King beating illustrates, we can even use these devices to ‘turn the tables’ on those who abuse their position. Some have argued that this signals the democratization of surveillance, offering ordinary citizens the power to challenge authorities. Yet, this strikes me as a contradiction in terms. A democratic society ensures and protects everyone’s personal privacy, elites and commoners alike; it does not facilitate universal visibility. (2000:155)

After hitting you with all this, I have nothing to conclude with. No thesis, no theory, no “best-fit” rhetoric to navigate the complexity or, as Staples suggests, contradictions of democracy and surveillance : We value privacy; privacy protects racism, sexism, & homophobia.

But here are some inConclusions anyway … more hunch & gossip than theory

(1) There’s something a little disturbing about “the masses” turning surveillance back onto ourselves.
(2) Increased surveillance of authority is as likely to produce more nefarious & cynical strategies of p.r. than it is to effectively keep the bad-ass behaviors of the powers that be in line.
(3) Surveillance might normalize public behavior; think Michael Richards & his brethren consistently not calling for the lynching of black people. It might even normalize private behavior; think Folely & his cronies consistently not using instant messaging programs for deviant purposes. But there’s little that cell phone cams & YouTube can do about the distribution of wealth, health care, minimum wage, etc. You know, those structural issues. Yes, the personal is political, but it’s not that political.

EP

According to GlobalPOV’s write up of a Zogby poll, privacy is for geezers; young net users conceptualize privacy differently than do older net users.

Evidence of this? According to the poll, “Only 19.6 percent of 18-24 year-olds consider their dating profile to be an invasion of their privacy, compared to 54.6 percent of other respondents.”

Are these different definitions of privacy significant? GlobalPOV thinks so, since these young people will one day be effecting policy decisions about web use & privacy.

What I find more notable is the pleasure(s) that young people & Web 2.0 users in general derive from online self-disclosure. A profile on a social networking sites (think MySpace or Facebook) is largely an accumulation of lists: favorite music, books, television shows, music. Blogs may not be as self-indulgent as some media gatekeepers claim, but blogs, especially as they’re situated in the larger blogosphere, generally involve some disclosure of & community building around shared interests & concerns. &, of course, blogs that function as online diaries are bound to mention the brand-name products that bloggers’ everyday rituals involve.

Apparently, there is enough discussion of companies & products in blogs to justify the existence of Cymfony. Cymfony (located in nearby Watertown, MA) is a service that other companies can use to “mine” blogs for discussions of their products & services. In a way, it provides a Nielsen ratings for blogs; a company that uses Cymfony’s services can find out what its “market share” of blogs is, in addition to the “top attributes” bloggers associate with its product or service.

The language that Cymfony & those who celebrate it use is telling. Cymfony’s homepage cheerily proclaims that the company is “harnessing influence 2.0.” A July/August 2005 RFL Communications, Inc. publication opens

“The rise of so-called ‘consumer-generated media’ online (e.g., blogs, chat rooms, etc.) has turned the Internet into something of a giant, free-wheeling focus group–and multiple research providers have cropped up to help marketers tap into the unprecedented wealth of insights.”

It used to be that marketers had to compensate consumers to participate in focus groups. It used to be that marketers had to solicit us for the information about our consumptive habits. Or, they could acquire it surreptitiously - by tracking our Web clicks & searches, for example.

In Everyday Surveillance, Willam G. Staples writes that the secretive-ish going-ons of market research on the Internet

“helps companies ritualize knowledge-gathering activities that build case files out of the smallest, mundane details of our lives, often without us even knowing about them. By increasing the amount of information they have about us, and by decreasing the amount of control we have over that information, private companies shift the balance of power in their favor. W e are thus vulnerable to being ‘targeted’ for marketing campaigns that bring all the ‘intelligence’ gathered about us together with the power of the human sciences in an attempt to shape and influence our choices, behaviors, and social and cultural activities.” (2000:148)

What is peculiar now is that we’re voluntarily giving up the information that marketers want without them asking for it. & we’re enjoying giving it up, finding the experience of creating & managing an online self pleasurable. & we’re creating our online social networks around the very data that market researchers desire. (I won’t go so far as to say that Web 2.0 users are manufacturing their own manipulation (& having a ball doing so), but that does seem like one implication.)

At least Web 2.0 is killing off spying; no one needs stealth strategies if we like publishing & publicizing what they want to know in the first place.

EP