Category: Digital Culture

Tools & Hands

We hear a lot about community and free expression when it comes to the Web.  From tech bloggers to legal scholars, the boosters spare little praise for the social benefits of technologically connected groups.  Some cyber gurus even go so far as to predict that these new communities are already spawning a new, populist dialogue that will ultimately change the nature of state governance itself.

In the wake of Friday’s heartbreaking events, we know of course that the blogosphere amped up on the subjects of gun control and mental health.  And while we tragically have to admit that there may be no policy safety net we might erect that would have stopped this particularly horrendous mass murder, I am hopeful that some of the shared opinions, stories, ideas, and even outrage might cause some measure of reflection on how we relate to the tools we create. Sometimes, social media really does foster a village, and we do extraordinary things like get help to hurricane victims or share thoughts with friends half way around the world and truly connect in ways I believe are unprecedented, profound, and positive.  But sometimes a technologically linked crowd is just one catalyst away from turning into a knuckle-dragging mob, and we need to pay attention to that, too.

When the Newtown story broke, I happened to be writing about Anita Sarkeesian, who appears in this video to talk about her experience with the wisdom of one crowd that didn’t like her form of free expression and sought to silence it in an ugly way.  Described on her blog as a feminist media critic, Sarkeesian launched a Kickstarter campaign last May to raise funds for a video project called Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, which examines the portrayal of female characters in these games and the social significance of those depictions. Sarkeesian is a gamer herself who works with, not against, the gaming industry; but that didn’t stop at least some of the online gamer community from launching a cyber attack on her that included death threats, rape threats, death with rape threats, invasions of her privacy through hacking, and a torrent of images depicting her likeness being violated and/or mauled in ways that suggest an investment of time, imagination, and loose coordination within the mob.

The average gamer in the U.S. is a male age 30, so this alliance of village idiots was not just a handful of dopey teenagers. And well beyond the gaming community per se, we’ve seen this kind of testosterone-rich, misogynistic cyber-bullying among high school kids, in certain memes, and even on the fringes of political debate.  During the overheated battle on SOPA, media executives were harassed at home, and a staffer for Representative Lamar Smith received similar sex-offending manipulations from netizens who clearly don’t know the difference between free expression and assault.  Happily for Sarkeesian, and for society’s better angels, revulsion to the attacks on her resulted in an outpouring of support, and she wound up raising seven times her original goal on Kickstarter. This enabled her to broaden the scope of her work, and several video game studios have also invited her to speak with them.

The clowns who attacked Sarkeesian are very likely a minority of gamers, probably even fairly decent people in real life, so is there something about the technology or the environment that brings out these depravities?  Odds are, you’ve been in chats where it’s hard to maintain or moderate a civil tone, even among friends.  Why do these interactions turn normal people into sanctimonious, vitriolic, trolls?  In his book You Are Not a Gadget, technology expert Jaron Lanier argues that the design of Web 2.0 is fundamentally dehumanizing, and here’s what he says about social media discourse:  “If you look at online chat about anything, from guitars to poodles to aerobics, you’ll see a consistent pattern:  jihadi chat looks just like poodle chat. A pack emerges, and either you are with it or against it.  If you join the pack, then you join the collective ritual hatred.”

I do believe tools sometimes have a way of becoming the masters of their makers, that certain tools are not exclusively neutral objects occasionally weilded by sinister or unbalanced people. Some tools change some people.  Isn’t this what the cyber gurus keep promising about the unchecked expansion of the digital age, a whole new kind of human being?  New maybe, but how human remains to be seen.  By relating to our toys and devices (and yes, even our guns) as extensions of ourselves, I think we all get a touch of a dissociative disorder that undermines empathy and, therefore, functional humanity.

In the same way some 2nd Amendment zealots imbue their weapons with a false notion of freedom from an imagined tyranny — therefore, turning a right into paranoia — I suspect the technology addicts who attacked Anita Sarkeesian imagined themselves as an odd band of freedom fighters.  They were using Photoshop and social media as weapons to defend their “way of life.”   And, of course, the hypocrisy is all too obvious — that the sexual nature of the attacks justifies precisely the questions Sarkeesian hopes to answer.

It seems we have a tendency to either want to blame or absolve certain of our creations for the harm that can be done with them. In the face of abhorrent, human behavior, we want simple answers to complex questions; but the truth is that it’s never one thing. It’s not as simple as blaming the guns or video games or violent movies any more than it would be to blame our keyboards for the almost universal lack of civil debate on the Web.  I don’t have answers anymore than anyone else.  What does seem true, based on the many comments I read over the weekend, is that we are groping around for our posterity and finding little satisfaction in the ever-expanding cacophony.  One word that seems to be at everyone’s fingertips right now is enough.  There’s a reason I call this blog The Illusion of More.

A Must Read – Steven Poole “Invasion of the Cyber Hustlers”

The overarching goal of this site is to question the often giddy, utopianism that accompanies our journey into this new, digital-age reality. I have proposed on a few occasions that battles over issues like copyright are really just proxy wars in a larger, ideological (even semi-religious) cold war between humanistic and techno-centric values.  Behind the overt defenses of online piracy or child pornography; behind the barrage of criticisms of old institutions; behind the idol worship of the concept open, there are new-age philosophers whose world views are anti-human, anti-intellectual, and anti-individual.

In this excellent, wry article for NewStatesman.com, Steven Poole offers a realist’s glimpse into the minds behind the memes.  Read article here.

The Opaqueness of Transparency

It isn’t just perception.  Partisan politics in the U.S. really is worse than ever, if we’re to take the word of those who’ve been on the inside for the last 40 or so years. I was listening to an audio version of Tom Brokaw’s book The Time of Our Lives recently, and hearing him describe today’s dysfunctional intransigence in Washington, I began to wonder why, in the age of so much transparency and mass communications, do matters appear to be getting worse? More to the point, is it possible that we’ve created an illusion of transparency while ignoring the fact that the way we tend to use digital media produces the opposite of rational and cordial discourse among both the electors and the elected?

Brokaw writes, “…modern means of communication are now so pervasive and penetrating, they might as well be part of the air we breathe and, therefore, they require tempered remarks from all sides.  Otherwise that air just becomes more and more toxic until is is suffocating.”  Sounds a lot like the blogosphere to me.

Those who vehemently pursue transparency through technology — everyone from hacktivists to open-government scholars– offer the premise that transparency through Web technology is not only good, but a near panacea to our political ills.  And while we certainly don’t want to see our elected officials get away with crimes and misdemeanors, I’m not convinced that the theater of rapid-response outrage we’ve created does much to thwart real mischief so much as it incubates some of the more toxic viruses in day-to-day governance — namely blind partisanship and associative reasoning.

The promise of transparency is meant to be an independent voter’s ideal — that with digital access to real data, one can make unbiased decisions based on the particulars of a given situation. In theory, information trumps partisanship. Through on-demand access to raw information and fact-checks, the argument goes, we can more accurately judge our elected officials as individuals rather than broadly associating them with the views of a particular party.  So why does our national dialogue sound more and more like a cacophony of lunatics?

One problem with the case for this kind of transparency is that it assumes data are neutral, which is a very techie point of view because to a computer, of course, data are neutral and interpreted by a fairly rigid code. In human affairs, and politics in particular, data are subjective and interpreted by a code called emotion that is both subjective and dynamic. Computers like data, humans like stories. That’s why an editorial about a proposed bill in congress beats reading the bill itself and a catchy, 140-character headline beats both.

While access does exist to unbiased, raw data, this access seems to have very little to do with how Web 2.0 is affecting our political evolution. To the contrary, social media is highly emotional and is referred to as a “hive mind” for good reason. Hence, the instinct to react, not only as individuals, but as mobs has been given an outlet through these technologies.  What we often end up with is our worst political instincts on speed pretending to be a more enlightened process.  If anything, the way we use social media and blogs seems to foster more associative reasoning, which allows (or forces) all issues to be painted with very broad brushes. This is the opposite habit that transparency is meant to produce.

Look at the way the tech blogs lit up last week over Rep. Lamar Smith’s appointment to the chairmanship of the House Science Committee.  It’s one thing if Representative Smith has a dodgy record on actual science, but TechCruch and others ran headlines decrying the appointment because Smith was the lead author of SOPA.  Even if you hated that bill for what it was, calling it anti-science or anti-technology makes as much sense as calling speed limits anti-Lamborghini. It’s a straight-up cheap shot with a clear political agenda. After all, Smith is a Texas republican and the author of SOPA. So, attacking him is good for scoring points among progressives, who will never bother to make the distinction that SOPA had nothing to do with science; and neither will they bother to look up Smith’s record on science issues, even though they could with a couple of mouse clicks.  In this case, the tech blogs are behaving much like FOX News, looking at all stories through a single filter.

I bring up this example because it’s recent, but also because some of those bloggers are the same folks who proclaim the unmitigated value of transparency while using the technology to promulgate more of the opaque, associative political nonsense that makes our politics so dysfunctional.  As a side note, Smith’s record on science is relatively unclear at this point, other than past remarks doubting the veracity of some climatologists; but let’s not confuse that with bills designed to stop an international criminal enterprise, shall we?

What we think of as transparency is often a lot of reactionary noise that can literally be a barrier to a better functioning representative government. Sure there are a lot of folks in congress with some pretty wacky ideas, but why does it seem that even moderate representatives can’t sit down to rationally discuss issues that shouldn’t even be partisan in the first place? Might the digital, global microscope be a cause for divisiveness itself?  We have to imagine governing — and heaven forbid compromising! — in an environment where every syllable, every meeting, every gesture inspires instantaneous, and often erroneous, condemnation that goes viral.

Mass media, especially the blogosphere, demands conflict because humans like stories.  But representative government can only function through compromise and cooperation, which fails to satisfy multiple constituencies at any given moment — and now, they’re all on Twitter. Hence, it seems only one of two things can result from all this so-called transparency:  1) that governance stalls; or 2) that functional governance can only happen in even greater secrecy than we had before the digital age.  It certainly wouldn’t be the first time technology has produced exactly the opposite conditions it promised.

It’s true that with a lot of time and effort, we can use the Internet to look objectively through a clear glass at our politics; but I suspect that most of the time, the window is truly opaque and that we’re always seeing at least a half reflection of ourselves.  If the people’s representatives are dysfunctional, then it’s possible that the people are as well.  The question remains as to how the design of these technologies might be playing a role in that dysfunction.