andrew.pilsch.com

Over at I’m Not Actually a Geek, Hutch Carpenter has an interesting post about the New York Times’s coverage of Comcast using Twitter to respond to customer feedback in the social media sphere. It’s interesting stuff. I’m especially interested in his response to the article:

What caught my eye in the NYT article is that some people are concerned about Comcast doing this. They feel like Comcast is acting like Big Brother. According to the article, 20 year-old Brandon Dilbeck blogged about his dislike of ads on Comcast’s programming guide. A Comcast representative found the post (Google blog alert perhaps?), and responded to him via email.

[…]

But to air your concerns publicly and have someone from the company read it? If you’re concerned someone would actually read your post, then don’t blog. I’m actually surprised this 20 year old was concerned. The Gen Y folks are supposed to be pretty open about everything in their lives.

I’ve actually written a little about this before, in a paper on revisions of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in contemporary SF/action cinema ( Equilibrium , The Matrix trilogy, Aeon Flux, etc.) and how this documents a nostalgia for the possibility of resistance afforded by Totalitarianism (in contrast to the smeared and distributed power network created by multinational capital). I identified the same problem seen in the above post (w/r/t Comcast): people are willing to perform a public lack of concern about privacy as long as there aren’t reminders of how public this information actually is. I was talking about the arrival of the news feed on Facebook and how this made a lot of people freak out about the fact that this information was being made public.

I suppose I could say that I’m beyond such concerns and, as an objective observer of the socius, this amuses me, but that isn’t the case. I’ve also received tweets from the Comcast twitter people (thanking me for nice things I said) and I was also recently followed by the State College Police Department on Twitter (which freaked me out). Why, though? Obviously, everything I say on the Internet is published. There are very few things I say online that I’m embarrassed by and I’m certainly not doing anything illegal. Yet I wasn’t comfortable with the State College Police following me on Twitter.

I talked about this article from the Collegian about Twitter and the police in class the other day and had trouble convincing my students that this was a problem. Everyone could see that Facebook is a really easy way to get in trouble, but everyone loves to put up photos of themselves drinking beer (although, their recent class party had Bacardi 151) despite the fact that they are 18. Had I not liked my students so much this semester, I would have put up some of the pictures I was talking about (they all friended me on Facebook). Even threatening to do this, though, they didn’t seem to see a problem.

Maybe we actually are getting beyond this problem that I observed a few years ago and that shows up in the NYT article. If I can’t explain to a room full of 18 year-olds why there is a problem with them giving away embarrassing information on the Internet for all to read, maybe we are moving out of this anxiety after all.

At the same time, it could be that my students will all have their chains yanked soon enough. Either way, this still doesn’t get at why people are so willing to publish personal details of their lives in what amounts to a distributed many-to-many system of surveillance. The best thesis my class and I could come up with is that we do it because it’s there. Which doesn’t seem like a good reason, at all.

Image Credit: Big Brother Congestion – IMG_3280 by jeroen020