Interwebology: Living in the Digital Panopticon
Perhaps one of his most enduring concepts, George Orwell's Big Brother has stayed in the public consciousness for six decades. Every new invasion of privacy or increase in monitoring raises questions about whether or not Big Brother has finally gone too far.
Orwell depicted a society that was not subtle about its monitoring systems; Telescreens were omnipresent and highly visible. The distinction between his world and ours lies largely in the fact that we either don't notice or don't think about most of the ways in which we are observed, much less their potential impact on our lives.
Viktor Mayer-Schonberger's new book, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, argues that the near-perfect memory of modern data storage, with its innate potential to be accessed over great distances and for years to come, is the latest iteration of this long-standing concept.
A moment of curiosity may result in an unusual search. A brief flash of anger could be channeled into a Tweet. An opinion based on misinformation could be espoused on the blog of a 15 year-old, and thanks to any one of enumerable caches, could still be accessible 30 years later, when its folly has long-since been recognized.
The problem with digital memory is that it has no sense of perspective. Human memory fails and forgets. Unimportant moments slip away, and impulsive decisions are placed in context. A harsh criticism or sudden outburst is tempered and justified by the inclusion of contributing factors.
Computers don't possess context. They store what we tell them to store, and their ability to do so accurately is being constantly improved. However, all that is being stored is data. It is black and white, ones and zeros. Retrieved at a later date or from a distance, it can paint an image of a person that is entirely one-dimensional and potentially inaccurate.
While Google is changing in one direction, having recently decreased its search memory from potentially indefinite to a period of nine months, the British government appears to be moving in the other. Their Intercept Modernisation Programme will mandate that all personal communication be stored for one year in a database accessible to over 600 public bodies.
The goal of the program is to make potentially important information available to a variety of services ranging from the police to the Financial Services Authority. One of the concerns being raised is that the retrieval of this information won't require a judge, but often little more than the approval of a department head.
There is, of course, the potential for good. Rodney Bradford was recently able to provide an alibi for an alleged mugging on October 17 of this year when the origin of a Facebook update placed him on his father's computer in Harlem at the time of the Brooklyn offense.
In addition to absolving the innocent, data monitoring can also condemn the guilty. University of New Mexico soccer player Elizabeth Lambert was suspended when a video of her pulling another player to the ground by the hair went viral on YouTube. Larry Johnson of the Kansas City Chiefs was fired, thanks in no small part to a petition started over homophobic slurs and derogatory comments about his own coach on his Twitter account. Tennessee Titans owner Bud Adams was fined a quarter of a million dollars when another viral video showed him flipping off the Buffalo Bills. All of these events have occurred just within the last two weeks.
Clearly the free flow of information can have its upsides. Many crimes are rooted in opportunity. If the opportunity is removed due to the increased likelihood of being caught, the crime rate may necessarily decrease. The concern is whether the impact this has on society will be little more than the product of fear.
Whether doing right for the wrong reasons will be good enough for us is more a question of values than anything else. The legal system is constantly trying to battle out whether doing wrong for the right reasons can be justifiable in certain circumstances, so this is yet another wrinkle in an ongoing debate.
George Orwell's vision of a dystopic world where we are good only because we are afraid or unable to be bad is slowly but surely edging into our modern reality. The continued growth of blogs, social networks, and other means of virtual visibility would seem to indicate that many people don't realize the potential impact of seemingly minor incidents, or simply don't care.
Vancouver psychotherapist Andrew Feldmar was permanently banned from entering the United States after a Google search at the border revealed he had experimented with acid in the sixties. For the chance to visit his children who lived south of the border, he would have to pay $3,500 for a waiver that, if approved, would allow him to travel freely for a period of a year, after which he would have to apply, and pay, again.
To most people, an event 40 years ago (and one as commonplace as acid in the sixties) hardly seems worth noting, much less using as a factor in the assessment of a person's current state. To a computer, however, data is data, and Big Brother is watching.
Orwell depicted a society that was not subtle about its monitoring systems; Telescreens were omnipresent and highly visible. The distinction between his world and ours lies largely in the fact that we either don't notice or don't think about most of the ways in which we are observed, much less their potential impact on our lives.
Viktor Mayer-Schonberger's new book, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, argues that the near-perfect memory of modern data storage, with its innate potential to be accessed over great distances and for years to come, is the latest iteration of this long-standing concept.
A moment of curiosity may result in an unusual search. A brief flash of anger could be channeled into a Tweet. An opinion based on misinformation could be espoused on the blog of a 15 year-old, and thanks to any one of enumerable caches, could still be accessible 30 years later, when its folly has long-since been recognized.
The problem with digital memory is that it has no sense of perspective. Human memory fails and forgets. Unimportant moments slip away, and impulsive decisions are placed in context. A harsh criticism or sudden outburst is tempered and justified by the inclusion of contributing factors.
Computers don't possess context. They store what we tell them to store, and their ability to do so accurately is being constantly improved. However, all that is being stored is data. It is black and white, ones and zeros. Retrieved at a later date or from a distance, it can paint an image of a person that is entirely one-dimensional and potentially inaccurate.
While Google is changing in one direction, having recently decreased its search memory from potentially indefinite to a period of nine months, the British government appears to be moving in the other. Their Intercept Modernisation Programme will mandate that all personal communication be stored for one year in a database accessible to over 600 public bodies.
The goal of the program is to make potentially important information available to a variety of services ranging from the police to the Financial Services Authority. One of the concerns being raised is that the retrieval of this information won't require a judge, but often little more than the approval of a department head.
There is, of course, the potential for good. Rodney Bradford was recently able to provide an alibi for an alleged mugging on October 17 of this year when the origin of a Facebook update placed him on his father's computer in Harlem at the time of the Brooklyn offense.
In addition to absolving the innocent, data monitoring can also condemn the guilty. University of New Mexico soccer player Elizabeth Lambert was suspended when a video of her pulling another player to the ground by the hair went viral on YouTube. Larry Johnson of the Kansas City Chiefs was fired, thanks in no small part to a petition started over homophobic slurs and derogatory comments about his own coach on his Twitter account. Tennessee Titans owner Bud Adams was fined a quarter of a million dollars when another viral video showed him flipping off the Buffalo Bills. All of these events have occurred just within the last two weeks.
Clearly the free flow of information can have its upsides. Many crimes are rooted in opportunity. If the opportunity is removed due to the increased likelihood of being caught, the crime rate may necessarily decrease. The concern is whether the impact this has on society will be little more than the product of fear.
Whether doing right for the wrong reasons will be good enough for us is more a question of values than anything else. The legal system is constantly trying to battle out whether doing wrong for the right reasons can be justifiable in certain circumstances, so this is yet another wrinkle in an ongoing debate.
George Orwell's vision of a dystopic world where we are good only because we are afraid or unable to be bad is slowly but surely edging into our modern reality. The continued growth of blogs, social networks, and other means of virtual visibility would seem to indicate that many people don't realize the potential impact of seemingly minor incidents, or simply don't care.
Vancouver psychotherapist Andrew Feldmar was permanently banned from entering the United States after a Google search at the border revealed he had experimented with acid in the sixties. For the chance to visit his children who lived south of the border, he would have to pay $3,500 for a waiver that, if approved, would allow him to travel freely for a period of a year, after which he would have to apply, and pay, again.
To most people, an event 40 years ago (and one as commonplace as acid in the sixties) hardly seems worth noting, much less using as a factor in the assessment of a person's current state. To a computer, however, data is data, and Big Brother is watching.
