Once in a Lifetime, Talking Heads

I wonder what are we using technology for? I know exactly how each media works for me and with time, I have learned to understand that things I can do in Facebook, I can’t do in Twitter (which I never use) or the specific reasons for having a blog.

Little by little, technological etiquette has become part of our electronic behavior but mainly we have also learned when too much privacy is spilled into the public, especially in social media. It has taken us a learning curve along these and additionally, to the portable technology we have to engage towards them. All these ideas made me aware there are other kinds of technology now more accessible to regular people out there, surveillance technology being one of them. 

Common people using surveillance technology, what is it being used for, I wonder but have no real way of knowing. But in an attempt of understanding the possible repercussions of social media and surveillance working together I wanted to create a fictional narrative to place an ethical question on the roots of it.

What are the benefits of social media used into local or global environments? Tracing the BP oil spill by the Bucket Brigade was one amazing example of it. A neighborhood watch is another good example: neighbors taking care of each other, sounds like a commendable practice, very good when you come to think of it. Even more so, when hurricanes and disaster might strike and you need a tight community to go through them.

Now, let’s pose a question for fictional purposes: What if a “people’s watch” working along any social media, would be centered on a certain individual to track his or her movements throughout the day? Now bear with me, this sounds completely absurd, but on the imaginary discourse I’m trying to achieve, I think it will make a point.

Lets imagine then, this social media watch hidden to the individual of course, where people could send images, videos, texts, that fed into the construction of a “social profile or log of activities” for this person. A Truman Show with the immediacy of the internet. The individual would be placed or framed by what people throughout the day could record from him or her. They would know where he or she had been, creating almost a real-time mapping of one person throughout a city. The where and whens of a day posted from supermarkets, coffee shops, bars, restaurants, gyms or the activities any person might go through a day or night.

For a menacing individual that would make an effective crime because it would make everyone aware of his/her actions throughout the day. Society would act let’s say, as a useful “twitter surveillance team” for the common well-being of its fellow individuals.

But what if… what if the reasons for singling out someone were arbitrary, let’s say intolerance, or imagining other scenarios like adultery, maybe even racial ones? And what if, they were not based on any real situations but the fact that someone was odd. Yes, odd. Now, odd, a little word that encompasses everything and nothing, a subjective observation of anything or anyone. Taken from the dictionary, odd means: Deviating from what is ordinary, usual, or expected; strange or peculiar: an odd name; odd behavior. [See Synonyms at strange].

To go back to this fictional tale, let’s assume this individual was speculated to be menacing. Just out of oddity, out of prejudice, or even ignorance. What would the psychological toll of an “assumed odd individual” through this scenario could be? Imagine this person going to places and being recognized in a way his / her psyche and sanity would be tested. Wouldn’t this twitter surveillance team act as a prosecutor and judge of character of any of these individual’s actions? If that person got too drunk one night, if he fell on the street, if she was sweaty or simply went to the movies. Imagine withstanding it every day in a way it became the morbid pastime of a bored society.

Would that individual feel free on this environment? What would this kind of social alert in a community and hearsay make out of this character’s reputation? Even further, if oddity would be the determining factor of the singling out, wouldn’t that make it an absurd social scenario for this person to make new friends or acquaintances? How could this individual engage to others under these sets of prefabricated circumstances or perceptions? When this individual assumed people thought he or she was odd due to people’s looks and reactions, things wouldn’t flow naturally. Slowly but surely clients could back away from engaging into business, acquaintances would start questioning this individual, hopefully his or her friends would remain so in the process. Ironic. It is true social media are used to propel people into interaction but social stratification could also become the (fictional) negative outcome of these.

To make matters worse let’s add surveillance equipment, let’s assume the collective social watch determined oddity was a factor for suspicion. What if normal people would have access to some of these, once handled by expert technologies. Invisible, infrared technologies acting “in favor” of the people and connected through social media. Imagine everything an individual does in their privacy of their home being completely noted, dissected and analyzed through someone else’s eyes. A microscopic observation of one, tiny "odd" individual by one source but immediately disseminated through the social media. An absolute loss of privacy for this individual would occur. A house would no longer be a home for that person but a pigeonholed carcass where sounds and visions could come and go through with no sense of self anymore. Privacy would belong to everyone making that individual infinitely vulnerable, a prey to its lack of discretion, leaving a vile back door open to his or her dreams.

The effectiveness of invisibility and the protection of this social media channels would keep that individual out of the loop. In cases where menacing individuals were involved, it would absolutely make sense. But in cases where an individual has been singled out almost randomly, or out of oddity, then that event would mark the beginning of absurdity for that individual. How can this person regain a sense of self when privacy is lost and regurgitated amongst people that have never actually or personally met this individual? What would be the outcome of endless murmured re-twitted facts and events of an almost overnight public figure? What would the loss of anonymity could create in an already perceived odd individual? In my fictional outcome, a complete and sheer desperation for personal confidentiality.

The ethical question around it must be made at this point. How can this individual (which from a lack of normalcy has been placed in this situation, product of his or her so-called odd actions) has a way to protect from these effective and propagating combination of media? Who sets the “odd” and “normal” bar of these actions? Who chooses whom to be singled out, especially when there might be cultural or social inadequacies in the mix? Who determines the acts of intolerance within social media and what about the number of people that follow these? After all, these channels are voluntarily fed and consumed by people engaging into them. Everyone’s contribution or point of view in any social media channel is not regulated but subdivided into opinions sometimes based on facts, sometimes based on speculations. A forum debating the actions, sexual behaviors, beliefs, motives and fears of one singled out individual. Wouldn’t and I stress, wouldn’t that behavior be considered odd?

What would be even more tragic, could be the psychological effects any person that would undergo this. The access to both these media were set out to be out of his or her reach making it a process impossible to understand. Blurring paranoia from reality, this individual would now have the potential to become well, very odd to say the least. How would he or she would be able to stop this tidal wave of unwanted attention, of social nakedness?

The psychological interpretation behind the Truman Show is that an individual cannot be placed in a Utopic world. That through knowledge comes self-discovery and thus, the maturity to leave a conformist world by assuming adulthood.

“Truman's fear of leaving this invented world, once he realizes it is a fraud, is similarly like our own reluctance to break our symbiotic relationship with media […] What gives this metaphor life is the way the movie depicts two attitudes we routinely take toward media. In one, we are absorbed by it; we accept its rendition of reality because it occupies our view. We are like children whose parents define their world […] As with many other forms of media, we are enriched by allowing ourselves to be taken over by its theme. But we also need to create a more critical distance, escape its invented world, and think about its meaning and effect on us, so we can use it to enhance our perceptions instead of allowing it to use us.”

[Source]

The fact that there are people doing whatever they want in the privacy of their homes is a right every person must have. Social media exist amongst us but I believe they should be used ethically because they are an expression of us as a culture. (You can’t just shout in caps or be shitty to someone in Facebook just because you will never get to see that person’s reaction). I believe they are free channels of communication but I’m sure when they partner up with other technologies, they should be used for a good cause. My imaginary account seems too cruel to be real, too unreal for an individual to even look for evidence, too useless to figure out because the truth behind it would be very simple: social media are nurtured by people’s kindness and hopes but just as well out of fears and frustrations. It is a mirror of who we are, of who we are capable of being unto each other but what seems harmless (bunch of words or images on a screen) can change the perception of reality. It made me think of Marshall MacLuhan, it made me wonder if the means of the Media Justify the Massage, after all, what are these combined and instant media saying about the human condition? About a place? Shouldn’t people be using these media for the reconstruction and birth of a new sense of place, of spirit, employed in the pursuit of their own happiness?

As a final note and the end of this fictional debate, I want to disclose the reasons of how I use my blog. It is a communication tool, an exercise in English writing, a virtual place where I choose to disclose parts of my intimacy but is also a bookmarking tool for audio, video and the art that nourishes the kind of work I do. I promised myself that I would only write what was true to myself, it has also become a way of self-discovery and as these things go, even stuff you said a few weeks ago might seem so outdated or stupid but they are there for one to figure out and see the process. I have the right to express myself through any media I see fit and in that sense I recognize the right everyone has out there to do the same and choose their own platform. What I utopically commend is the hope that these are all used in a constructive, looking-for-the-best-in-humanity-trapped-in-a-crummy-world-kind of way, adding up to knowledge, beauty and hopefully, truly promoting understanding of one another. I hope media are used to comprehend the insanity that comes from ignorance and diminish the established parameters of normalcy. I believe, above all things, this is what matters the most, making flexible these “subjective oddities” that come from within different parts of one nation or people from other nations/cultures in another nation, even sometimes from what seems other galaxies. Anyone’s life can be odd if a microscope would be placed up their ass. Really. In my sad, paranoid and fictional tale people are using social media or surveillance technologies to hunt obsessively for a miserable and empty cause but I believe there are other stories of people using these technologies out there where there’s no room for morbidity, stories that speak about the grandiosity of a place and it’s people, of differences and tolerance even amongst “odd” individuals.