Personal Panopticons — Real Life
Metadata
Highlights
- cynical expert.” These individuals were better informed about privacy concerns than their peers but also tended to be more likely to share personal information
- Privacy, we might say, was the default setting of the experience of the self. Now, to the degree that social media is the dominant technology of the self, these older parameters of the private self are as likely to be experienced as privation and a failure to appear in social media feeds may be experienced as a social liability.
- In no small measure, this derives from the widespread adoption of platforms engineered to reward self-disclosure with greater visibility, a system that depends on seeing the platforms as ubiquitous. The incentives work together with the inescapability they presuppose to produce subjects who more readily accept and participate in the broader surveillance regime, further entrenching the dynamics of networked privacy.
- Rather it confronts the risk of emerging webs of manipulation and control that exert a softy deterministic influence over society. The Apple Watch (or the phone or the AI assistant or the Fitbit) is just one of many points at which these webs converge on individuals. Tech companies, who have much to gain from the normalization of ubiquitous surveillance, have presented their devices and apps as sources of connection, optimization, convenience, and pleasure. Individualized understandings of privacy have proved inadequate to both perceiving the risks and meeting them effectively.
- Ian Bogost, writing in the Atlantic, has described as full-blown “privacy nihilism,” which presumes an omnipresent regime of surveillance that we can no longer resist and may as well not bother to try. He points to experiences of what we might call the data uncanny — “someone shouts down the aisle to a companion to pick up some Red Bull; on the ride home, Instagram serves a sponsored post for the beverage” or “two friends are talking about recent trips to Japan, and soon after one gets hawked cheap flights there” — that have led users to erroneously conclude that their phones are listening in on their conversations.
- This all suggests the broader possibility that the pervasive presence of surveillance helps produce people who are more at ease with it — people who no longer know what privacy is for, or what socio-moral milieu could give it value
- The Underground Man’s chief problem may be his unquestioning acceptance of an individualist framing of identity. It sunders him from any human-scaled networks of interdependence — i.e., communities — within which his individuality might have flourished. Instead he accepts his isolation and doubles down on its terms.
- In this new context, privacy has become a matter of negotiating the terms of our heightened visibility to maintain a degree of autonomy over our self-presentation
- your data is everywhere, and nowhere, and you cannot escape it, or what it might yet do to you
title: Personal Panopticons — Real Life
author: L. M. Sacasas
url: https://reallifemag.com/personal-panopticons/
date: 2022-02-15
source: pocket
tags: media/articles
Personal Panopticons — Real Life
Metadata
Highlights
- cynical expert.” These individuals were better informed about privacy concerns than their peers but also tended to be more likely to share personal information
- Privacy, we might say, was the default setting of the experience of the self. Now, to the degree that social media is the dominant technology of the self, these older parameters of the private self are as likely to be experienced as privation and a failure to appear in social media feeds may be experienced as a social liability.
- In no small measure, this derives from the widespread adoption of platforms engineered to reward self-disclosure with greater visibility, a system that depends on seeing the platforms as ubiquitous. The incentives work together with the inescapability they presuppose to produce subjects who more readily accept and participate in the broader surveillance regime, further entrenching the dynamics of networked privacy.
- Rather it confronts the risk of emerging webs of manipulation and control that exert a softy deterministic influence over society. The Apple Watch (or the phone or the AI assistant or the Fitbit) is just one of many points at which these webs converge on individuals. Tech companies, who have much to gain from the normalization of ubiquitous surveillance, have presented their devices and apps as sources of connection, optimization, convenience, and pleasure. Individualized understandings of privacy have proved inadequate to both perceiving the risks and meeting them effectively.
- Ian Bogost, writing in the Atlantic, has described as full-blown “privacy nihilism,” which presumes an omnipresent regime of surveillance that we can no longer resist and may as well not bother to try. He points to experiences of what we might call the data uncanny — “someone shouts down the aisle to a companion to pick up some Red Bull; on the ride home, Instagram serves a sponsored post for the beverage” or “two friends are talking about recent trips to Japan, and soon after one gets hawked cheap flights there” — that have led users to erroneously conclude that their phones are listening in on their conversations.
- This all suggests the broader possibility that the pervasive presence of surveillance helps produce people who are more at ease with it — people who no longer know what privacy is for, or what socio-moral milieu could give it value
- The Underground Man’s chief problem may be his unquestioning acceptance of an individualist framing of identity. It sunders him from any human-scaled networks of interdependence — i.e., communities — within which his individuality might have flourished. Instead he accepts his isolation and doubles down on its terms.
- In this new context, privacy has become a matter of negotiating the terms of our heightened visibility to maintain a degree of autonomy over our self-presentation
- your data is everywhere, and nowhere, and you cannot escape it, or what it might yet do to you
title: “Personal Panopticons — Real Life”
author: “L. M. Sacasas”
url: ”https://reallifemag.com/personal-panopticons/”
date: 2023-12-19
source: pocket
tags: media/articles
Personal Panopticons — Real Life
Metadata
Highlights
- cynical expert.” These individuals were better informed about privacy concerns than their peers but also tended to be more likely to share personal information
- Privacy, we might say, was the default setting of the experience of the self. Now, to the degree that social media is the dominant technology of the self, these older parameters of the private self are as likely to be experienced as privation and a failure to appear in social media feeds may be experienced as a social liability.
- In no small measure, this derives from the widespread adoption of platforms engineered to reward self-disclosure with greater visibility, a system that depends on seeing the platforms as ubiquitous. The incentives work together with the inescapability they presuppose to produce subjects who more readily accept and participate in the broader surveillance regime, further entrenching the dynamics of networked privacy.
- Rather it confronts the risk of emerging webs of manipulation and control that exert a softy deterministic influence over society. The Apple Watch (or the phone or the AI assistant or the Fitbit) is just one of many points at which these webs converge on individuals. Tech companies, who have much to gain from the normalization of ubiquitous surveillance, have presented their devices and apps as sources of connection, optimization, convenience, and pleasure. Individualized understandings of privacy have proved inadequate to both perceiving the risks and meeting them effectively.
- Ian Bogost, writing in the Atlantic, has described as full-blown “privacy nihilism,” which presumes an omnipresent regime of surveillance that we can no longer resist and may as well not bother to try. He points to experiences of what we might call the data uncanny — “someone shouts down the aisle to a companion to pick up some Red Bull; on the ride home, Instagram serves a sponsored post for the beverage” or “two friends are talking about recent trips to Japan, and soon after one gets hawked cheap flights there” — that have led users to erroneously conclude that their phones are listening in on their conversations.
- This all suggests the broader possibility that the pervasive presence of surveillance helps produce people who are more at ease with it — people who no longer know what privacy is for, or what socio-moral milieu could give it value
- The Underground Man’s chief problem may be his unquestioning acceptance of an individualist framing of identity. It sunders him from any human-scaled networks of interdependence — i.e., communities — within which his individuality might have flourished. Instead he accepts his isolation and doubles down on its terms.
- In this new context, privacy has become a matter of negotiating the terms of our heightened visibility to maintain a degree of autonomy over our self-presentation
- your data is everywhere, and nowhere, and you cannot escape it, or what it might yet do to you