I was in agreement with Nathan Jurgenson’s review of the film We Live in Public, which documents the “part art and part social experiments” created by Josh Harris: it “paints a far-too grim picture of living in public.” While Harris brilliantly sought to anticipate “what the world might be like when the Internet ‘took over’; when we supposedly are all connected to the web, our every movement and thought monitored,” the extremism of his experiments, the lack of ethical treatment of the subjects, and Harris’ own controlling and narcisstic personality (“I’m a celebrity” he repeats towards the end of the film) serve to discredit his pessimistic point of view.
Despite the extremism of Harris’ views and experiments, there is a fair warning in there somewhere – especially for feminists online. The “surviellence culture of social media” makes using the internet as an escape that much harder. While sites like Facebook are “opt-in” the social pressure to use such websites is increasing; as Jurgenson writes: “if almost all of your peers are on Facebook – and this is the case for many – then it could be very costly to not live in public.” Much of the film explores the legitimizing effect of living publicly; “people live publicly in order to exist, to be real, to be seen by peers.” This is a commonly accepted idea, as demonstrated by use of the phrase “facebook official.” [Is Facebook changing our intimate relationships for better or worse? This blogger thinks the latter – but that’s a subject for a separate post.]
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Jurgenson, in his review of We Live in Public, effectively breaks down the dichotomy between privacy and publicity: “privacy and publicity always imply eachother.” This seemed to me the integral missing part of Harris’ thinking, as there was no opportunity for participants in his experiments to curate their self-presentation, to deal with “the interplay of revealing and concealing” as users of the internet and social media now do on a daily basis. However, this awareness of the surveillance culture of the internet may actually be serving to further biopower online, as the systems of oppression that exist in physical reality are mapped onto our virtual reality. Rather than using their awareness of the surveillance culture to subvert these systems of oppression we reinforce them through our use of social media. Women are embodied on Facebook though their profile pictures, their relationship status, their sex – and despite our control over this information, it has to exists publicly for us to exist – our identity is based on the snapshots – literally – that we provide the world.
Living publicly through Facebook also increases the potential for discrimination, harassment, bullying, etc. As Brian Spitzberg and Gregory Hoobler wrote in their article, “Cyberstalking and the technologies of interpersonal terrorism,” “with increased access to interpersonal contact comes increased potential for interpersonal intrusion.” Facebook certainly provides increased access to interpersonal contact, and the common idea of “Facebook stalking” is an indication that the platform is often used in intrusive ways.
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This is a potential springboard for the increasingly documented cases of cyberstalking, cyberbullying and cyberharassment – often based in the oppressive systems and discriminatory ideologies of the physical world that have been replicated online.
This isn’t to say you shouldn’t let people find you on Facebook. Just be careful what you put there, and who you let see it.
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