Brian Conley's News & Notes

Recently I brought up the possibility that Google’s goals on the internet resembled a latter-day panopticon. This is obviously a bit of a dire prediction, so I’d like to offer another, more hopeful possibility.

As social networking and the distribution of media, social or otherwise, become more and more advanced, so do the tools for reaching an audience and for gathering information about that audience. A single individual, with a well-formed strategy and access to the time to implement is gaining more and more potential to fulfill a role in society once accessible only to massive multi-million dollar media corporations.

According to wikipedia,

The Panopticon is a type of prison building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in 1785. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell whether they are being watched, thereby conveying what one architect has called the “sentiment of an invisible omniscience.”

What I’d like to propose is that it may soon be possible for this situation to see a reversal of sorts. It’s seeming more and more likely that it might it soon be possible for a seemingly omniscient aggregator to gather all human knowledge in one measurable, quantifiable database. However, this brings with it another possibility, that connecting all of these users is making it more and more likely that it might someday be possible for a piece of media to at least appear, if not be, omnipresent.

Furthermore the entrance barriers for usage of these tools are collapsing, they are already nearly free in many parts of the world and will likely only continue to decrease in cost while increasing in power. In a way it is beginning to look like there may be some type of analogue to Moore’s Law within social media and the dramatically increasing capabilities of mobile devices.

What this means is that citizen media, if properly harnessed, is gaining more and more capability to have an impact, to reach an audience. In my analogy of social media as a reverse panopticon, rather than an omniscient observer/guard, aggregating all knowledge and observing and quantifying the thoughts, feelings, and actions of humanity’s “prisoners, quite the opposite happens. The access to social media, and its ever increasing potential reach means that a single “broadcaster”/storyteller, rather than “aggregator”/guard has the potential to push the images of the oppressed, the voices of the developing world, to an increasingly large audience.

In some ways, the potential omnipresence of “content” takes the place of the “guard” and the wealthy, privileged, educated, and members of the developed world, with their access to broadband and mobile data tools, might become “prisoners” of a sort, awash in the “hegemony” of the developing world’s social media onslaught.

It has been pointed out perhaps countless times that we are “only limited by our capability to dream.” Margaret Atwood (correction, Mead-thanks Steve & Meghan!) said, “Never doubt that a small group of committed citizen s can change the world, indeed it is the only thing that ever has.”

Mrs. Atwood Mead and I don’t agree on that point. I would counter that although that may or may not be true, you should also add, “and men with guns.” However, the more I experience the possibilities of ICT for Development, the more I begin to believe that though it may not have been true before, it is becoming true.

Information and Communications Technology, digital media tools, and mobile computing is becoming ever more accessible in the developed world, but in much of the developing world these tools are still years away from being widely accessible to local people. It is only with the intercession of concerned, privileged citizens of the developed world, using their access to capital and agency to support the promotion and distribution of the stories of the developing world, that we can hope to assist in making a difference, possibly even staving off the collapse of fragile states.

Consider the impact that CNN and the onset of 24 hour news coverage made on the media industry and the policies of States in Iraq, Rwanda and Kosovo during the 90s. Someday soon we will have the technological capability to empower the citizens of communities in crisis, fragile states, conflict areas, thand the developing world to speak to us themselves, to tell their own stories and ensure they are seen.

I know many will consider me a dreamer, an idealist, or a naive optimist. But consider our success in Iraq, Mexico, Gaza, Iran, and Afghanistan, where we used freely available technologies to help local people tell the world the stories of their existence in dire situations, conflict, and war.

And today I am in India, working with Video Volunteers to create a rural newswire encompassing nearly every state in India. We’re going to do it, and we are in the middle of strategizing a social media plan to distribute the content far and wide, as organically as possible. We may be a few years or even decades ahead of our time, but I have no doubt that, in the proper hands social media could turn the tides of institutional complacency and apathy toward the dangers facing fragile and developing states all over the world.

With the release of Buzz, and the much hyped privacy disaster coming so soon after rumors that Google was talking with the NSA< one has to ask whether or not Google really is trying to kill privacy.

An unfortunate thing about privacy, in the online space, is that privacy there is directly connected with access to anonymity. There is essentially no anonymity online, without taking active measures yourself to ensure anonymity. As there is no anonymity, there is little or no true privacy.

It’s probably important to understand why there is no anonymity. A brief explanation, when you are surfing the web you have a unique IP address, whether it is one address distributed to many sub addresses connected to a home or office router, or your computer connected directly. This IP address is noticed by the website you arrive at, which can now also gather the url you arrived from and the url you depart to. Utilizing “cookies” which are small pieces of text your web browser stores locally, websites can gather more information about you and your browsing habits. When you connect these with personally identifiable data like Amazon.com or Facebook, or even iGoogle accounts, you start to see how your anonymity dissipates.

It is precisely because of the need to move from more anonymous data to less anonymous data that companies like Facebook are doing so well, and companies like Google are exploring how to get into the social media game. Unfortunately for Google, they underestimated the importance of “privacy in context.”

I’m not sure I agree with Helen Nissbaum’s thesis in overall, but I do agree with this:

The nuts-and-bolts of my theory says that privacy depends on the social context of information being shared and what’s appropriate for those contexts.

What Google forgot is that, even though any n00b privacy activist will tell you that email is not private without encryption, people feel anonymous and feel private with their email. Just as an individual might be empowered by wearing a mask, that same individual can be empowered by email to engage in activities they wouldn’t otherwise.

The question of anonymity online, full anonymity, is rarely considered by many outside of threatened human rights activists and privacyphiles. The feeling of anonymity or privacy however is taken for granted.

When first Facebook, and then Google Buzz suddenly began broadcasting information about users to the world, in Facebook’s case to everyone and in Google’s case “following” everyone you email or chat with regularly based on some unknown algorithm known only to them, these users came face to face with the latter-day Panopticon.

Some readers may think I’m at risk of drifting into histrionics here about the rise of a security state or the NSA tracking your computers location via internet latency measurements, or the FBI wanting access to your browser history. This is not what I am attempting to suggest. I see the Google Buzz accident as an event that demonstrates the desire of Google to eliminate the idea of privacy, so that we become not just happy existing in a digital panopticon, but so that we recognize its there, and then forget.

Under such a lens it makes sense that Google would ask the NSA for help, or that they would so greatly underestimate the potential backlash from Google Buzz.

According to NYT, Sergey Brin of Google said that by offering social communications, Buzz would help bridge the gap between work and leisure.

In the same article, something perhaps more blatantly reminiscent of a Panopticon comes from Facebook:

“We don’t aspire to be just a Web site where people connect and share with friends,” said Ethan Beard, director of the Facebook developer network and a former Google executive. “We want to be the underlying technology people use to connect with friends wherever they are on the Web.”

Google wants to kill anonymity. So does Facebook. Their business models depend on it. They want to kill anonymity more than privacy, but if they continue to kill privacy context, people will continue to be up in arms.

Unfortunately, you should be more worried about access to anonymity and the increasing interconnection of your everyday actions with a searchable, aggregatable, quantifiable database that is the Internet.

Jeremy Bentham could perhaps not have imagined a world where closed circuit cameras turned “public space” into its own panopticon, where shoppers and citizens alike could never know who was watching them, monitoring their movements, keeping an eye whether they were acting for good or ill. Such power could surely only be reserved for an omniscient/omnipresent being the threat of whose observations, lets be honest, were the actual precursor to the Panopticon.

The increase in sociality some have begun talking about also tends toward the potential for increasing the reach and capabilities of the State. It’s yet another reason that we should continue to push for access to anonymity online. If privacy is effectively killed, and your every online habit can be broadcast to an infinite number of “guards” sitting at their own little “observation posts” ie web browsers, it won’t be long until most of us begin to ignore the internet Panopticon as much as we do the one at Walmart, our office job, or the local shopping mall.

That’s not a future I’m anxious to see. What are your thoughts? Please comment!