Public cyber-space

It’s been playing on my mind, as I plot, plan and make preparations in the background to re-arrange my use of blogging software and social media; what exactly constitutes a public space on the Internet, and given my values, what course of action does this mean I should take?

The past couple of years of blogging, for my part has been pretty quiet in the flame-wars department. Or perhaps it’s just that my metaphorical nerve-endings have been singed off and I can’t tell anymore.

Whatever the case, it’s usually in these heated circumstances of (often simply alleged) incivility and ego, that the question of ‘whose turf is it anyway?’, rears its head. The period of calm has been helpful for reflection.

Around five years ago now, amidst what would become a hyper-acrimonious, multi-participant, blog-spat, involving high-resolution photography of eviscerated children, hacked websites, anti-Semitic rants and lashings of invective, an analogy was put forward.

‘Allowing someone to comment on your blog is like allowing them into your home’.

I paraphrase of course, the rationale (such as it was) mostly being repetition of the very same point, focused through haughty attempts at purple prose, framing the photo of an obviously mis-characterized individual, lifted from who-knew-where on the Internet. The use of the likeness of an innocent for the purposes of caricature, was pretty telling in itself; a warning of the fanciful judgementalism and invasions of privacy that would follow.

The psychology immediately seemed to me to be a case of extending the boundaries of one’s ego too far – everyone involved had to subsume themselves as somehow an extension of the host, readers being permitted to suckle on a supposed intellectual manna from heaven, in return for payment in narcissistic supply.

Or they could be cast out (and then cyber-stalked). Does this sound familiar to any Facebook users?

These were my gut instincts at least, up until it all started getting a bit too Freudian. And pointlessly gory. And I decided to bow out and say goodbye, vowing never to again name the party in question.

I’ll take a large breath before continuing.

How private can an open forum be?

There is a sense of course in which this ‘in your home’ analogy is true and in no trivial way.

The phenomenon of cyber-space is for the administrator, a bit different from what you see at the front-end.

If you were running your own WordPress server, people’s comments on the blogs you host wouldn’t so much occupy a place in ‘cyber-space’, as they would occupy space on your privately owned hard-drive. ‘Cyber-space’ being conceptual space, hard-drive space material.

What automatic entitlement does someone have to publish data on your hard drive? Obviously none.

But… (You saw that coming?)

We do, when we engage in discussion online, create a conceptually public space built up from a framework of largely implicit social contracts.

Most of these implicit social contracts aren’t articulated because they don’t need explicit articulation – being many this would be onerous. In this respect, expecting to be free of online torrential abuse, is much the same as expecting visitors not to shit on your lawn. When caught, unless experiencing some kind of cognitive difficulty, the perpetrator has no reason to find confidence in protesting ‘but you didn’t tell me not to’.

Unless your associates are barking mad or utter barbarians, there’s an awful lot you don’t need to spell out.

Most of the implicit contracts go like this. You behave, you get to participate. And if common sense about these things were more common, and more sensible, things would run a lot smoothly.

However, it’s when the social contracts are contestable and implicit that difficulty really ensues; what for example, constitutes abuse and in what context; where does doggedness turn into spamming, and more to the point of this post, in what ways can conceptual cyber-space be viewed consistently as public or private?

Teasing the implicit out into explicit action can be taxing because you have to wing it. Doing this with fair application across an entire scope of experience is even more difficult because the risk of double standards and self-contradiction is high.

Avoiding hypocrisy…

The thing with implicit contracts that I’m concerned with, is not that they are unspoken but that they are implied by something. Smutty language can imply age of entry, which in turn can imply a requirement for mature social skills.

I’ve said ‘shit’ in this post, and I do expect you to be adult about it.

Similarly, the way a blogger, tweeter or social media junkie uses their technology of choice can imply things about the publicity of the cyber-space being occupied.

Take Facebook for example. The ‘it’s my home’ analogy doesn’t hold up at all well when you’ve got five thousand ‘friends’ on your ‘friends’ list.

Being literalist about Facebook terminology won’t resolve this. You can’t maintain five thousand personal, private friendships. It’s humanly impossible.

Some of them, most of them, will be so poorly maintained as to make the conventional definition of ‘friend’ an inappropriate choice of semantics.

(Which is not to say you can’t make real friends over Facebook, or that you need to be friends ‘in real life’ to be real friends*).

The fallacy committed when one treats a plethora of Facebook friends, like a personal clique, is one of equivocation; a real ‘friend’ isn’t the same thing as a Zuckerbergian ‘friend’. You can’t just play hopscotch between the two.

This is of course, where the afore-mentioned egoism can come into play for those with large friends lists. It’s Zuckerbergian ‘friends’ when interaction is to be controlled, but for purposes of self-image and prestige, it’s five thousand good, personal pals who’ll attest to how awesome their host is.

(Seriously, how emotionally shallow do you have to be to define a deep, meaningful relationship as one you can just conjure up with an automated ‘friend finder’?)

I dwell on this not because of the psychology per se (although that’s obviously still important), but precisely because the implications go beyond the purely vain.

Having a hundred personal, in-real-life friends on your Facebook friends list, implies different things about the openness of your Facebook ‘wall’ than having thousands of Facebook ‘friends’. By maintaining a super-abundance of ‘friends’, the user implicitly declares that their venture into that part of cyber-space is in some sense – in the quality of interaction at least – more public than private.

How this translates into any given policy isn’t clear. Applying this ethic can be done in a variety of ways, depending on what one has to deal with, and what other policies may be under ethical evaluation.

Consider the popular Facebook user who uses their wall to announce allegations against their interlocutors. How do you manage right of reply in such a setting? The technology at hand presents many options; the accused could  be allowed to reply in the same thread as the accusation, or elsewhere, to be highlighted by the accuser in a subsequent status update.

Despite these ambiguities, there are at least thought experiments in which the idea of a Facebook wall as a strictly private space are unambiguously problematic.

Take a mutation of the accuser scenario above; consider instead that the popular Facebook user simply denied all right of reply, asserting that their wall, used to make ostensibly public accusations, is a private space and therefore that the accused has no influence on what is posted there at all. A private space we are expected to believe, is shared in close confidence with all five thousand ‘friends’.

I’ll take it that anyone with the slightest imagination and just a hint of experience with Facebook, will see this as both a plausible scenario and undeniably troubling. (I mean ‘undeniably’ in an intellectual sense, I’m sure psychologically there are people capable of the mental gymnastics required to be okay with this arrangement).

This is just one permutation of the underlying problem. Even the issue of equivocating between real ‘friends’ and Zuckerbergian ‘friends’ is a subset of a deeper problem; equivocating between private and public in order to maximize the benefits of public interaction while fatuously invoking private rights and privileges to avoid public responsibility.

‘It’s my resource, and whatever the consequence, I’m not responsible to others for how I use it!’

To illustrate my point, I’ve used a particularly colourful illustration of how this mentality can play out, but there are other concerns that I have that arise from the underlying logic. The impetus for my concerns being that I’m considering expanding my Facebook ‘friends’ list to rather more dramatic proportions.

Why I’m carping on about it…

There will of course be Facebook friends that I consider real friends, even those I’m yet to meet in person; people who would cause me some sadness if I were to lose them (I expect them to know who they are implicitly). But like every other human being on the planet, I can only spread my affection and attention so far.

The reason I’m considering expanding my friends list is one of pragmatism; the promotion of future writings.

This coupled with the obvious limits of my attention, forces me to cede in reciprocation that people will use any such presence on Facebook in line with my pragmatic, public approach; I’d have a diminished basis to complain about invasive interaction when already ‘putting it out there’.

It follows from this, that I’d also have a responsibility to protect or segregate where necessary, that which I really want kept private. Facebook doesn’t make this easy, and while there’s always grounds for criticism of the technology along these lines, it wouldn’t remove my responsibility, and plonk it down on everyone else.

Simply, there are things I wouldn’t place on Facebook, and it’s along these lines that I’m considering ‘de-friending’ my family members.

Sure, I don’t want to have to worry about them being pestered by some kook who’s trying to burrow into my home life, especially when my family’s use of the technology is almost exclusively personal. They aren’t signing up for what I’m considering, and as patronizing as it may seem, despite the inevitable protestations and good intentions, I don’t think they’d fully understand what they’d be opening themselves into.

But this is incidental to my more binding concerns.

It’s fair to say that if I’m going to assign some semblance of public status to my Facebook presence in any morally significant way, I’m responsible for outlining the exceptions to expected behavior. You can’t fairly serve up mashed potato and carrots on someone’s plate, then complain they should have known the carrots were off-limit.

So it’s not so much that I’d want my family protected (although I would), it’s that I think I’d have a responsibility to potential innocent offenders to help prevent them mistakenly becoming actual offenders through my own thoughtless use of the technology. No amount of ‘oh I don’t mind’ from the relatives could possibly ameliorate this particular concern.

I may not go through with the exercise of course, but I’ve been reading opinion by publicists urging aspiring authors to cultivate their social media presence, and I appreciate and respect the role and advice of the publicist. Even if I find self-promotion icky. Even if I loathe how when Facebook says ‘fan’, I mean ‘someone who likes’; how when I mean ‘interested in’, I’m expected to ‘like’, and when so many Facebook ‘friends’ aren’t real friends.

(If I’m going to consider working with a technology in a way that doesn’t align perfectly with my ethics and sensibilities, and I’m willing to make the necessary considerations to make it work, at least I can groan about it, right?)

I’m sure if I proceed with the considered use of technology, there’ll be other problems arising from this view of a conceptual public space, challenging me not to deal with them like a hypocrite, or perhaps just challenging me to change my values and admit I’m wrong.

But if I can manage the venture without treating it like a narcissistic popularity contest, without vacillating between privilege and infallible irresponsibility, successfully providing an attractive asset for potential publicists and a viable platform for my slactivism, all while not losing my wits, I’ll be well chuffed.

~ Bruce

* People being too nostalgic for more traditional relationships would do well to inquire into the role of personal correspondence in the years before the automobile! Rather than erode personal interaction, I think social media technology has resurrected in some sense, an art of long distance communication.