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.

why can't i be ripped off by somewhere reputable.

Oh look, a year old blog post of mine has be re-published somewhere.

To be fair, I don't have a specific problem as long as there's reasonable attribution (which there isn't, in this case). I don't hoard ideas, generally. But I'd like at least a link and my real name if you're going to use my material to draw attention to your work.

Of course, this got me thinking about my own piratical actions. I'll probably blog about that later on today.

increasing complexity of identity management.

I think it’s been established that people are now brands, especially if they decide to participate actively in social media. It’s not a binary ‘brand / not brand’ thing, it’s an issue of success and ubiquity, mom and pop vs. walmart. This, however, has complicated identity management beyond what any previous generation has to deal with.

I have two jobs, and as such am a representative of those brands. My publicly accessible actions, photos, profiles, etc., have been (to an extent) constructed to exclude content that would be harmful to the brand I represent. Basically, I’m censoring myself in several instances, because I have to make sure that my actions, even in online manifestations of my personal life, maintain the decorum that my work life demands. Lots of people I know deal with this issue by locking away their online profiles, forcibly (and incompletely) segregating their identity.

I’ve decided not to go that far, because my social / online identity is at time useful currency in work related situations, and I’d throw away the chance to get to know more about people who are initially work contacts.

I also write this blog, and therefore have to carefully watch what I do and say, as that is the sum total of control I have over the perception of the broken gentleman as a concept. I put the ideas out there, and people decide what they mean. You’ll notice I more or less keep my personal life off this blog, and I intend to continue to do so.

I’m the only person responsible for the Jon Crowley social brand online, and it has, more or less, been subjugated to the benefit of the work life / blogging brand values.

The reason I, and I assume many of you, use social media is the benefit in creating a trackable past, both for yourself and those you encounter, as well as connecting to others without having to worry about time or location.

As a transition generation, I think the ‘why’ of using social media is going to suffer in service to offline life, professional life, etc. This will probably continue until we decide that seeing evidence of something happening isn’t all that different from knowing it’s happening but ignoring it for propriety. Until values shift, social media is going to suffer as we try to put the genie of transparency back into the lamp.

democratic panopticon

[This is a work in progress, and it will be either heavily edited (when I am less sleepy), or re-written and re-posted (possibly with better defined arguments). Let's just consider this one workshopping online.]

This post is heavily thematically linked with a previous one, titled Paparazzi Panopticism.

Thing one: Warren Ellis' Crooked Little Vein includes a character who discusses the idea of cellular phones with cameras as a weapon. Any they are, because it allows anyone to create content, news content, information content, disruptive content. If you want the speech, buy the book. Seriously. It's brilliant.

Thing two: My father, who has, over the years, gone from the kind of guy who buys a 286 and convinces his wife that it's good for the kids (which it shockingly was), to the kind of guy who dislikes that blogging gives anyone a platform to say anything, made a compelling comment over dinner. That a world where people have cell phone cameras is a world where corruption is harder to get away with.

These things got me thinking. The effect of everyone being about to record anything isn't the us vs them issue that so many people think it is. The Panoptic reality this creates isn't binary, there is a more complex dynamic than authority vs people. What we're left with instead is a democratised panopticon, where interpretation and evidence can come from all sides, and from all agendas.

The intriguing part of this, for me, is the subversion of the original theory. Panoptic realities are about people policing themselves in fear of an authority who may or may not be watching at any given time. But the current situation isn't just about authority. Now there is reasonable need to fear that any action that would offend a reasonably sized community will be shown, and you will be penalized socially for it, by that group, and groups affiliated.

To put it simply, this isn't just about being caught standing against the whims of authority, now. It's about the possibility of being caught, at any time, for any act deemed against society, or even peace in society. This is more involved than fighting authority, for one simple reason - a democratised panopticon is inescapable.

In terms of fighting authority, it's marvelous that someone can't be tasered needlessly without it being caught on film. Authorities should be held responsible for their actions, because they have power. The same can be said for celebrities, which justifies, to an extent, the concept of the paparazzi panopticon. But a democratic panopticon seems to bring with it a need to better define the limitations of acceptable behaviour, of what acts, statements or opinions are anti-social in a strong enough sense to require response.

Or will the standard reply be something to the tune of 'live like no one's watching'?

paparazzi panopticism.

Communication Theory 101: Foucault and the Panopticon. The general idea, skipping past the actual specifics and the path to the point, is that people who know they may be watched, without being certain WHEN they are watched, police themselves.

This is, at core, the major principle behind law enforcement. Punishment is an issue of deterrent, rather than justice. In short, we don’t commit crimes not only because it would be wrong to do so, but out of fear of getting caught.

Enter the modern era’s obsession with celebrity personal lives.

I was watching Lionel Ritchie on CBC’s The Hour, and one of the questions he was asked was whether or not his daughter, Nicole of Simple Life and drunk driving fame, was ‘okay’.

His answer is irrelevant.

The point of Foucault’s ideas was that people policing themselves, a society that polices itself, is the end result of a watched society. If you look at any one of the pre-eminent gossip blogs, you’ll see that the exact opposite is in effect,

When Britney, or Paris, or Lindsay finally accepted that privacy no longer existed for them, that paparazzi were ALWAYS watching, whether or not they could see them, they had to make a choice. It was either to live their entire lives as though the entire world was watching (because, most of the time, it was) or to live as though no one was watching at all.

So we get upskirt shots as they come out of limos, and celebrity sextapes, photographic evidence of idiotic behaviour, whether neglecting the safety of a child, or neglecting standards of decency.

Foucault, apparently, was wrong. When faced with a panoptic reality, societal norms aren’t reinforced; they’re demolished. This is the same reason constant surveillance is the hallmark of an unjust state – if watched closely enough, everyone is a criminal, is a failure, an embarrassment. Ergo, if you’re equally despised whether you do something small wrong, or live like a hedonist hero, you might as well have the fun.

The interesting thing about this is that it can be read one of two ways; either they have decided to own up to their behaviour, radical transparency style, and not care what people say, or they’ve simply decided that any behaviour will be derided, so why bother behaving.

In no way am I excusing the current rash of drunk driving celebutantes. I’m just looking at the impact this has on theory, because everyone else just seems to focus on the decision to either mock or pity them.