[discussion]: Expletives Not Deleted

by Ninthesis on May.25, 2010, under (sub)cultures, Boxing Shadows Street, new media, rants

You know, I’ve been trying to put a finger on what bugs me about some of the rebuttals as per a certain social networking site that people are allowing to be (ZOMG!) the ruler of the interwebnets. Then, I watched this really funny (and incisive) video by the blogger behind Feminist Frequency about The Real Reasons why Guys Should Hate Twilight. Ah. Ding. “The Real Reasons” as opposed to “The Wrong Reasons”. The same thing applies to some of the protests against the leviathan we’re trying to keep in check. I use the collective “we” here. It’s a consensus, I am but a tiny voice as an internetwebs user, but I feel I have as much right as any netizen to voice these concerns.

The Right Reasons

I could list them down for you, or you could have a think about it. In the end, it’s about the masses giving what this blogger calls the little shit, all of your information, all of your lives so he can make tons and tons of money and become an even more prominent little fucktard. Think about it. It’s a case of people unnecessarily making a social apparatus indispensible. I don’t care if people are being exhibitionists, mostly. I’ve been a blogger and have had an online presence for thirteen years now. I’ve had charges of exhibitionism thrown at me by people who really don’t understand what the internetwebs are for and really don’t understand the concept of online fiction, online publishing or even the D-I-Y, indie ethos that fuels many of these endeavours. And yes, sometimes this ethos comes hand in hand with baring your soul or your lives in a certain way. Fuck, isn’t that why we like certain kinds of fiction, or drama, or film, or music? Yup. That’s beside the point. The idea that people are comfortable with less privacy as a result is also complete and utter bull. It’s been a surreal couple of months, watching this drama unfold online, feeling like one is watching a Huxley or Orwellian story arc manifest itself in our lives. It allows for creepiness such as creepy relatives or ex-boyfriends or various stalker-type personalities thinking it’s okay to find stuff out about your lives. It allows our peers or colleagues to think they have a right or say as to how we conduct our personal affairs, whether online or offline*. Not. Cool. The funny thing is that this is why some of us RAN to that walled garden to begin with. Only to find that the effect was doubled, even multipled within the claustrophobic confines of that sterile white-edged-with-blue online supermarket aisles of said social networking service.

Here’s something we all learned in the `90s but an entire planet full of internetweb n0obs unleashed upon us thanks to Web 2.0 do not seem to fully grok: Your Internet Presence Is NOT YOU. Your Status Messages or Tweets are NOT YOU. There are various levels of filtering happening, we don’t share every detail of our lives. We select. This is the same level of healthy filtering that should happen in your day to day interactions. The fact of certain salient points of your day being published does not abrogate your right to privacy. It’s not okay to be a creepy stalker jerkoff just because someone has a blog or a social networking presence. However, this privileged dipshit would have us believe that it is permissible and that complete strangers, your colleagues, family members etc have a right to details of your life that you have chosen not to share with them. Since fucking when did he become king of the world? Right. Since we let him. The question is this: How much are you willing to give away just for convenience and the ability to market yourself? When people start telling me things like they’re afraid of losing connections or that they will be “isolated” if they leave this social networking hub, I just shake my head sadly. If you fear this loss just by shutting down one site, you’ll have to reconsider how you’re connecting with the people in your lives.

Artists make art with whatever we find. Sometimes that includes online publishing apparatuses. But you need to ensure you know what powers or rights you’re giving away and if you’re absolutely sure that you’re okay about it. Maybe I’m more anal about this than most, maybe part of this is understanding how laws work because of law school, but let me state for the record: It’s not okay for people to retrospectively take away your rights without your consent. Ever. I don’t care what crazy-ass level of newspeak is operating, it is never okay. This is basically what it boils down to. I refuse to consent or condone such an action by remaining in any location for the sake of convenience.The moment you allow this to happen, the floodgates open. It appals me sometimes how much of our rights and personal autonomy we allow to be taken away from us. So. I’m writing this mostly for the artistic and creative community. Please consider alternative services. Support younger efforts such as *diaspora. I’m not saying Web 2.0 is all bad. I have enjoyed and benefitted from the connections I’ve made. But I’m saying, you have to learn who calls the shots. The big guy. Or you. Or us.

I like the “us” option, personally, but hey, we’ve already determined that I’m a dreamer. The good news is that I don’t dream this dream alone. Is there a way for us to be individualistic and yet collective? I’d like to think so. That’s the balance that should exist in a healthy society. Autonomy, privacy, togetherness and community should not be mutually exclusive. Know this, when *diaspora or a project like it is finally released, I’m going to do what I can to get a Mythic Folk edition running for my own network. Maybe I don’t have enough technical know-how to do it on my own, but delegation and appreciating the different skillsets my peers have is part of what makes an internet community. It’s part of why I <3 the internet.

* Caveat Lector: Things I rant about here may or may not resemble this blogger’s life. Mostly it’s an aggregate of what I’ve been hearing from other people/bloggers.

6 Comments for this entry

Aditu
May 25th, 2010 on 04:53
In regards to various social networking sites, I belong to them for the purpose of being able to be in contact with people I have met that I wish to not lose because I forgot to ask for an email or a phone number. I don’t have a lot of “friends” or “connections”, but the ones I do have are important. So really, I take a pretty passive approach to the issue of privacy. I know enough to show only the people I want to show the information about my life; I don’t put anything “compromising” on there; I don’t make certain work or school related people “friends”; basically, it’s me not being completely stupid about using it. Since I have basically nothing up there that I would consider super private and get upset about being bared to the world, I’m pretty passive about such changes. (Of course, I’m passive about most things, but that’s beside the point!) I know I fall under the category of “it doesn’t effect me, why should I care” because of this, but isn’t that really where a huge majority of users probably fall anyway? The minute they do something that I don’t like and I can’t control, I’ll disable my account (not delete, because I’ll give them a chance to fix their goof-up). We can only hope that most people will actually take that step… (I’m with you, I’m a dreamer!)
Niniane
May 25th, 2010 on 07:03
@Aditu:

You’ve made some good points. When I joined that particular site, I was basically of the mentality that “I’m already a quasi-public persona in terms of blogging, I’m not really posting anything new here”, and to a certain extent that was true. While some people assumed I was sharing a lot with the world, the point was that I filtered a lot, and a lot of what I wrote in my status messages were intended to be humorous, or flippant, or ironic epigrams. But social networking filter-interpretation was a whole new kettle of fish!

Zuckerberg claims that he’s making changes based on what the masses want/agree to, that it is okay for previously private status messages to be made public and index-searchable etc. But in my eyes, the legalities are dodgy, if this was a real-world situation he would be sued for breach of contract. Actually, AFAIK there’s a couple of lawsuits going on.

I think social networking sites are OK. It’s just that we shouldn’t hang everything on just one or give any that much power over us. You don’t strike me as one of the sheep I hear on the bus or @ uni who let FB rule their lives
arcus
July 14th, 2010 on 23:49
Social networking sites like Facebook (generally speaking, but this is especially true of Facebook) in may respects are the antithesis of the design ethos of the internet. The internet is driven by a number of protocols which are developed openly, available for anyone to implement, and as a result you can have any number of products that can run anywhere that all speak the same language – no-one’s in charge, and anyone can do what they like on their own machines.

Take, for example, email. There are scores of email clients and email servers, and you can get an email address from anyone with a server who’s prepared to give you one – you can even run your own server if you want. Anyone can use any email software to send anyone else in the world with an email address a message. If you don’t like your software or your email provider or your email address (perhaps it gets too much spam) it only takes a small amount of effort to get a new one. And no-one can decide you can’t have one, or what you can send in emails, or that you can only email other people who pay Company X for their email, or who gets to see those emails (this last bit is a little debatable, but you can always use encryption…).

Whereas social network sites are the opposite: they’re locked down, owned, and controlled. Want to let your friends with Facebook accounts see what you’re up to, when you’re using Livejournal? Tough luck. You have to get a Facebook account, or they have to get Livejournal accounts. Facebook can decide how their site will play with whom, and it doesn’t matter whether you like it or not. This is, of course, exactly what you’d expect a private company to do, as there’s no profit in allowing everyone to communicate with everyone else unless you control the infrastructure.

Fortunately for Facebook, people don’t care about a faceless corportation providing their social infrastructure.

(Livejournal is slightly better than some of the others, they have, to some extent, embraced what little open standards there are for social networking, but they couldn’t really be said to be making herculean efforts in this regard – they still want you to only play with other Livejournalers, basically)
arcus
July 14th, 2010 on 23:52
OK, diaspora looks more like it :]
Niniane
July 14th, 2010 on 23:57
Diaspora is pretty nifty but we haven’t seen how it works in the real world yet. I’m looking forward to seeing what that does. Livejournal is okay but still flawed in that it is being run by a corporation. I think diaspora would work kinda like what you explained about email, arkoo. To a certain extent, diaspora is to facebook what Jabber is to proprietary IM (IMO) `course, I can’t get people to use Jabber either :-/
arcus
July 15th, 2010 on 00:50
Well, not exactly.

Diaspora is (or will be) an open source social network software *application*. To be a true analogue to corporate social network sites like Facebook what XMPP (Jabber) is to proprietry IM things like ICQ would require an open *protocol* (or maybe a set of open protocols).

Diaspora, or something like it (I see it’s not the only such open source project) is a vast step forward in the right direction, but you’re still a hostage of their implementation. Granted, this doesn’t give them anything like the same kinds of control as Facebook currently has over the Facebookers (and the incentives are different for open source projects anyway, even ones led by a corporation), but it’s still a limitation. Ruby doesn’t run everywhere, just as an example (I see GNU Social has decided on PHP for this kind of consideration – PHP hardly runs everywhere either, but it does run on the vast majority of hosting services servers).

Although, any properly designed networked application would have to have the interfaces between the nodes well documented in some way shape or form, I should think, otherwise things would be a complete mess, so perhaps Diaspora would essentially provide a protocol anyway.

On the other hand, it’s not as if there haven’t been successful open source projects which are also complete messes…