We Live in Public-Blog #3

I am of mixed feeling regarding this film. While there are certainly takeaways that are applicable to modern life and our relationship to technology and surveillance, I think it ultimately is dealing with perspectives and technologies that are now dated in comparison to our present reality. At the time, coming to grips with a reality that was publicly broadcast was much more farfetched and difficult to grasp. Examples were not present in the same way. But now, our society has had years of seeing tell-all reality television and Twitch streaming is a wildly popular enterprise. People make millions off of sharing their lives with an online audience, and its not at all difficult to grasp or consider doing for ourselves. Boundaries regarding conduct and what is and is not seen are also much more defined and enforced than what was present in the experiments. This entirely changes the potential dangers faced by those who share, both physically and emotionally. While some of the same themes regarding privacy and intimacy still exist, the tools present and understanding that exists regarding the medium are far greater than what existed during Harris’s time engaging in these experiments.

We are certainly made to question what privacy truly exists when we are monitored in that way, and one may see some hollowness to the ideas of hiding things from camera or keeping certainly relationships hidden from the online audience. There are countless examples of TV or Internet personalities having their addresses leaked, their accounts hacked, their pictures leaked, or being stalked. The reality of that is simply that their presence casts a wider net than the common persons. Statistically, they’re more likely to engage and maintain the interest of a person who may be unstable or capable of engaging in those behaviors, because more people encounter them through their online presence. All of that same information, the addresses, the accounts, the pictures, the family connections; it all still exists to be found and exploited for each one of us that are a part of modern society. Hardly any individual can be considered truly off the grid. The difference is simply a matter of motivation. Only some humans out there have the motivation and capability to engage in those truly privacy-violating behaviors. Those with larger presences are more likely to be found by any one person who is also online, thus more likely that that one person is one of those unstable individuals. But the reality that all need to accept and more people should be aware of in the first place is that we’re all engaged in the same way at this point. Our social media accounts, our browsing data, our locations; it all gets shared and stored and documented. We can all be reduced to numbers and images. Its a trade off that we made for the advancement of technology, whether we knew we were making it or not. So, rather than trying to deny it or hide from it, the priority should be educating the masses and engaging in a more constructive dialogue about how data storage and monitoring is handled. Too much is left to uncertainty and attack with the way our platforms are divided among private companies that care more about profit than about humanity. The information that people are interested in, our research, our relationships, none of it should be sold. It shouldn’t be monetized in the first place. Capitalism has so embedded itself into society’s unconscious that we cannot draw the line between what should and should not be made part of the money-making machine. Ownership and greed have warped our priorities so that the pursuit of ungodly, sickening amounts of wealth and possessions is nearly inescapable, and we see knowledge as a catalyst for profit, rather than appreciating knowledge for its own sake.