In the social sciences, there’s a concept known as the definition of the situation. It means that we, as humans, learn to adapt our behavior to the situation we perceive ourselves to be in. So, whether we’re in a meeting with colleagues, at home with our families, or out with our friends, we act differently based on where we are and who we are with. Today, however, the definition of the situation is much harder to get a handle on. Wherever we are, whoever we’re with, there’s always nearby a little device that has the potential to capture what is going on presently and share it in perpetuity. We know this, it is not news to us, but we rarely think about it in any serious way. Yet, it has serious implications for human social interaction. I’m going to share a personal story that will hopefully help demonstrate what I mean:
Picture it, New Brunswick, NJ, 2005. I’m in grad school, and looking to blow off a little steam. My husband had just gotten an Xbox 360, which, for the first time, allowed players to play online with other people in a different location. We logged onto Xbox live to play Halo, a military style alien shoot-up game, and we called up our friends, another couple, to play. We were in our apartment, and they logged on from their place. We decided to play a game of Capture the Flag. It was good fun.
So, if you’ve played video games, you may have experienced this: your competitive spirit rises up in you. And, well, our friend, he was really good – and he kept killing us! Over and over again! I got annoyed. I started making fun of his user name and his sneaky playing style: “Oh look at me, with my little sniper gun. I just hide out in a corner really far away and never leave so I can find people and shoot them over and over again.” My husband thought it was hilarious. We were cracking up. He pulled out his FLIP phone and started recording, and I went off.
Later that week, we got together with them in person and told them about it. Everyone laughed. My husband pulled out his phone and played the video. Everyone thought it was hilarious. But, watching it again, I realized, my behavior was, actually, pretty mean-spirited. It’s not how I normally act, and certainly not how I would have acted had our friends been in the room at the time. It wasn’t a side of me I wanted them to see. And even though he was laughing while watching the video, the friend I’d made fun of gave me a brief glance that meant, “Corinne, I had no idea you could be so vicious!” I felt bad. I felt ashamed.
And, it also felt, to me, a little bit… oppressive. Without that tool, without that phone always just there and at the ready to be employed at any time and for any reason, it would have just been a story that we told them about, framed in a certain way and left to the imagination. It would not have been possible for anyone but the two of us who were present to witness my actual, kind of mean, behavior. And somewhere, deep down, I perceived a restriction on my freedom to adapt my behavior according to the definition of the situation that I was in.
Our ability to discern the definition of the situation that we’re in does, in fact, have implications for our freedom to act and speak. Protection of privacy is, fundamentally, a protection of freedom. But here’s the thing: there was no one who was oppressing me. This was an activity that was driven by the sheer ease and availability of recording and sharing technology, and one that I voluntarily participated in. Why wouldn’t we record it - it was funny!
Now, I was 25 years old at the time, and had had plenty of properly defined and appropriately boundaried situations to grow up within. This experience was very minor, and did not have lasting impacts on anything of significance in my life. But, realize this: the babies who were born that same year are 17 today. Most of our college students were just toddling around in diapers when this happened. And since then, technology has exploded. And as they grew up, so did tech.
When they were little, their efforts to learn how to act in the world were not limited to their homes. They were not only captured, but instantly shared with friends and family, and sometimes on public platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter; many still remain there to this day. These kids went through their formative years, their adolescence, young adulthood, with not just a few embarrassing but pivotal experiences with a wrongly perceived definition of the situation, but never really knowing a situation which could be fully defined to begin with. A lifetime of constantly and repeatedly having their actions in one situation revisited in other contexts in ways that they were never fully intended for. As they were growing, as they were learning, as they were gossiping, as they were experimenting with their identity and creativity, as they were pushing the envelope, (as they were discovering how many drinks is too many)…
This constant context collapse has been the default mode of young people’s communicative experiences since the moment they opened their eyes, and we expect them not to feel anxious, overwhelmed, oppressed? No wonder they have a desire for “safe spaces” - there are none to be found! They do not feel free to be themselves, in any situation, anywhere, because nearly all their interaction could end up almost anywhere else at any future point in time, and they’ve been burned too many times before. Unlike my experience, which just felt oppressive, this creates a situation, a mode of living, that actually is oppressive. They are not free. But, again, here’s the thing: in most cases, it’s not because anyone’s actively oppressing them, but simply due to the ease and availability of recording and sharing technology and activities that they voluntarily participate in.
So, you may be thinking, what can we do? You can’t put the genie back in the bottle, you can’t close Pandora’s box, you can’t legislate away voluntary behavior. These technologies aren’t going away. While that is true, we can start being more conscious about how we use and respond to them. We frequently assume that media and technology are deterministic, that we are following their lead, but it’s been shown time and again not to be the case if we are even just a little bit thoughtful about our uses of them.
Writing in 1997, Pierre Lévy argued in his book “Collective Intelligence” that we were going to need to undergo a period of “apprenticeship” in which we adapted our “mental models and patterns of action” to better suit the benefits that these new tools could bring (and don’t misunderstand me, they do bring benefits!), but that it would take us some time to do so. He was right. Twenty-five years later, it would seem that we are still learning. The tools have evolved faster than we could adapt, but we can take a moment, now, to gather our bearings and take back control. We do not have to simply accept that the way things are is the way they have to be.
In the digital age, we see new behaviors, new norms, and new ethics being quickly and unconsciously adopted, en masse, all the time. It’s time we start consciously adopting new ethics that are better adapted to the world we now live in. And if we’re going to get out of this mess, one of these ethics needs to be an one of mutual privacy protection, which we can adopt in ways both big and small. We can, for example, make more of an effort to:
· more frequently simply enjoy the moment without recording and capturing everything of interest that happens.
· ask permission of our friends or strangers before posting pictures of them or their children online.
· ask ourselves “would I wanted this posted about me?” when commenting about other people’s lives on the internet.
· offer as charitable an interpretation as possible of a statement or behavior of someone caught on camera that makes them look bad (and not help spread it around ourselves).
· refuse to participate in online mobs that punish people with job loss, lost opportunities, and potentially real physical danger, just because we disagree with something they did or said in a place and time where we ourselves were not present.
We can question doing these things, we can be more considerate, and we can watch out for each other in the technological space.
And this isn’t just about young people; this goes for those of us who were afforded the opportunity to grow up in a world without these pressures too. Especially us! We can, for instance, find ways to:
· be more understanding if our students or employees don’t want to keep a live camera streaming into their private homes during Zoom classes or meetings.
· refute the idea that the big tech companies should be allowed to have a monopoly on our personal data just because they can use it to improve their advertising models.
· protest governments’ use of geofencing technology to track and monitor protestors, even if we disagree with what they’re protesting.
· speak out against digital “passports” that contain our personally identifying information, along with our driver’s license, medical records, and credit histories, as is currently being proposed and even implemented in parts of the world.
· not use these tools for everything, just because of convenience or access.
· expect more from ourselves and each other in the online space, calling for higher standards for human interaction and care than what has been typically exhibited thus far.
· think more carefully through what the consequences and trade-offs might be whenever we turn to the cold, impersonal, standardized, and undiscerning approaches of technology to solve our problems.
We can question doing these things, we can be more thoughtful, and we can watch out for each other in the technological space. We can and we should start doing this, today, before the world forgets the true value of privacy and being able to communicate in context.