the age of accountability.

Many moons ago, I wrote a post about something I called the Paparazzi Panopticon. I'm fairly sure I forgot to attribute the original idea to Bentham, focusing entirely on Foucault, but the core idea, a democratized version of the all-seeing eye, has never stopped being interesting to me.

I've been having several conversations in this vein lately, focused on accountability. People are accountable for each word of every email they send, anything they post online, comments and images published through social media sites, anything that happens on video, audio, or print. And nothing ever goes away, because we aren't dealing with one outlet that can be 'reasoned with' or 'bullied', we're dealing with reality.

The reality is, the internet has made us all accountable for anything we do, either as a means of recording our actions, or as a means of publishing them.

And this is a Very. Good. Thing.

If the method of surveillance is in the hands of the government, I'd be terrified, and suggest that you adopt a similar course of action. This is because I rarely feel as though the government has similar values to mine. And improper action only gains awareness online when it becomes a cause pushed by a passionate community. Short version: in our democratized panopticon, cops shooting a restrained youth will be made public. My use of orphan works to illuminate a point in a presentation? If no one is impacted negatively, there isn't an uprising.

Accountability isn't a bad thing. Ideally, it just means that we all do as few things we aren't proud of as possible. The counter argument is that people will be punished for anything they do that doesn't toe a company or government line.

My counter argument for that? It won't be too long before companies and governments demanding total control and limitation of employee's private expression becomes the latest infraction to spark a collaborative response. The internet made Tropicana change its logo in a few weeks. I think we can get people to care about corporate attacks of the freedom of expression that private citizens have.

Will people get fired for telling off clients, even indirectly, over social media? Yes. And they should. Because the most important lesson yet to be learned by most of us is that THIS IS REAL LIFE TOO. It's not a hiding place where you can act in ways that would shame you in real life. It's not a playground anymore, not entirely. It's another facet of real life. The separation many of us hide behind is flimsy at best.

This is real life. Real life means accountability, which means better actions, and better people. We just can't let ourselves get caught in the trap of spending out time policing the minor issues, rather than uniting to deal with the major ones.