Defense of Privacy, Crafting of Identity, Lying about Our Presence, and What Kind of Complexity to be Expected with Future Technology
Identities of Confusion and Virtual Personas
People have been, even they are inclined to deny, struggling with every new type of media they created for themselves. It can take years, decades or centuries for the interaction with the media to become something natural and universally acknowledged. Books, for example, were fundamentally bizarre objects that upturned the way people interacted with texts before, even though the idea is just to bind more than one sheets, slabs or lambskins all together. But the book has became so well adopted in our cultural life, an object that skeoumorphed the design of a lot of other things, that it is impossible for us to recall there was a manual about how to use a book and turn the page.
Genevieve Bell’s talk about creating multiple on-line personas as a social phenomena across various cultures reassured the “slow motion” of people’s adaptation towards a new media. The “unconscious defense” to media technologies are something tied to the condition of being human: we do not like changes; we initially resist external forces of change; we can not stand continuous migrating and aimless wandering; we do not usually go for changes ourselves until we are bound to. Bell has pointed out that though a lot arguments have been made about how swift people have adapted to new technologies, most of the thing people do for the majority of their lives remain surprisingly unchanged for a very, very long time.
The “playful practice” about one’s virtual identity, such as keeping an avatars as opposed to one’s own personality, managing multiple personas across various communities, impersonating opposite gender or different age groups, can be viewed as an experimental practice of adapting to the Internet media. The practice is also an “act of defense” per se that “allows further time to mess around the system to figure what it affords”. Multiple on-line persona remains to be a heated topic for anthropological and psychological study, but among the common users, it has been taken for granted to some extent that people don’t bother to question much about the morality other than just accept it. Almost everyone has made more or less some “lies” about their age, gender, background, experience or careers.
Dynamic data vs. Static data
Beyond such practice of identity crafting, a new form of information sharing has changed the rule of game namely the “live feed”. It was something when you first saw it, as an experience you have on the day when Google started their dynamic search, and then you hesitate if you should go ahead send the message to your friend’s mail box or write something on their “wall”. And the result is, you go ahead and publish the message on their wall but deleted the part that said “It was Lisa who told me to zip up your flies.”
Being “open” is essentially a fair thing, as the players all reach a deal that they are willing to trade in their privacy for more immediate and extensive connections. But in this game, timing started to play a crucial role and it turns the static data, say, profile information, into immediate happenings about oneself. There then arouse a potentially greater danger if someone gives a falseful piece of information or “lies” about who they are, because the audience are all stay tuned and ready to pinch the holes.
The strategy to deal with the conspicuousness of one’s identity has led to defensive action like concealment and ambiguities. We came across things like “you know I’m on your side”, “good job,” and “isn’t that tempting?”, which do not make sense to us as an outsider since the language is apparently coded through a specific context. Being more public will finally result in a sharing of information that is least relevant to a deep self. The sign that people are starting to getting along with, if not by, the social networking thing, is a more homogenized picture of “everyone seems cool and happy”. And may homogeneity is the answer to Facebook, achieved through collective practice of figure-it-out.
I believe people are still on their way to make sense out of everything and are tapping further into the potential of on-line social medias. And some are more adventrous and experimental than others, and thus become the social hacker of technologies. They misuse, other than following the collective amnesia of forgetting how we used to live before all these, the new media in order to gain extra values out of it, usually in an unexpected and unintended way. One of the hidden value being discovered about social media so far, is a new form of “privacy”.
Emergence of New Privacy
As I was researching about the issue of privacy in digital and social media, two points of view stand out that I think further clarify the meaning of “privacy”. The first by Paul Donrish in his earlier study of privacy, secrete and identity with collective information practice, on the level of both virtual and physical infrastructure, that privacy is “something that people do rather than as something that people have”. The idea implies the possession of the privacy as something gained through the process of seeking, learning, laboring and crafting, under the notion that privacy is no longer a gifted right one is born with.
The idea is also elaborated in Laurent Haug‘s articles on privacy, with, however, an interesting emphasis on the maluse of today’s social media. Haug discerns the space one creates for themselves by publishing something they are actually not doing or being, with their community. He named the new type of privacy “publicy“, and the space around one’s actual presence and the publicized selfs the “plausible me.”
Based on Haug’s observation, I would like to point out the nuance between using locational and non-locational application to “lie about one’s presence”. The latter based on one’s own language describing the condition, and the former with assistance of the media itself as a persuasion to its audience. It seems to me that the difference between Twitter and Foursquare is a big one in the view of future as Foursquare uses the indication of one’s physical presence on the map, as a supplementary material to the story being told.
And this is a crucial differentiation and it ties back again to people’s adaptation to new media, because using location sharing media to tell the story, is more likely to be the situation of the future. And when it comes, it will change the rule of game again by adding more physicality into the way we interact with people and things. Therefore the strategy of “lying about oneself” and “privacy defense” is expected to be even tougher.
Foursquare is however, nothing impending at the moment, as the locational data it provides is a proximate kind. It does not have strict rules about how far one has to be away from the place they check in, which affords a number of intentional maluse of the “check-in” gestures. It has been found that a lot of “off the grid” checking-ins are made by people intending to hide from others. It is a noble way of lying, after all, to deem back one’s privacy and to seek for periods of seclusion.
Then what about future? What will be changed with the next generation of media and how will that affect the strategy of “playing with identities”?
Pervasive Computing and Identity Play
The latest trending of technology has indicated that the vision of pervasive computing (ubiquitous computing or ambient informatics), once being questioned heavily against its practicality, is on its way back, with however, new faces that somewhat assembled the one being portrayed by Mark Weiser, the father of Ubicomp back in 1980s.
The reason the picture we are seeing today seem varied from the vision of its prophesiers (Mark Weiser, Bruce Sterling, Adam Greenfield, Julian Bleecker etc.) is that before the revolutionary shift of the computer from a desktop to a daily object can be made, it is more reliable just to turn to the latest or earlier technologies to testify the theory. “Computing” has chosen cell phones as the “object” because the mobility of the device and its versatality of making connections with other objects have made cell phones a perfect metaphor of ubiquitous interaction. Scanning a label, embedding information into the object, pointing the camera to the streets, allowing a friend to see us on the map… these are all examples of interaction with pervasive technology. But as we talk about future, our imagination often soars way faster than being factual that we forget a web cam is a sensor and turning on the TV and the speakers with the phone is an example of building our own ubiquitous network. Mike Kuniavsky (author of “Smart Things”) pointed out that toy and car design are actually ahead of all others in the user experience design of ubiquitous objects, but toy designers “did not think of themselves as being in the computer business, because they used information processing tactically as a way to differentiate in a competitive market.”
Seems like I spent more than necessity explaining why pervasive computing might still be the vision of future. And going back to the topic about identity playing, a couple of things I foresee that may change the rule of game again in this version of future, that will make “hiding from people” more complicated and different task:
First, the increasing automation of objects tend to create a comfort zone making us more susceptible to intrusion of privacy.
Apple’s fail to fix the alarm clock bug has resulted in numerous iPhone users oversleeping for an hour as they switched to winter time. It is a simple example of how gap between the expectation and accident can affect our daily routine. “Alert” is almost the first word a smart object learn to speak, followed by other context-aware behaviors like setting itself on a task and pre-streaming of data. We can expect our e-Magazine to download all the digital contents before we going down the metro station and the parking meter to send us a message as it about to expire, but what if they fail to do so? More smoothly the system functions, more trouble to be caused when accidents or intrusions of privacy occur.
Second, having a system of networked objects makes the “unplug” gesture more complicated than just “turning off the light”.
Instead, it defies consideration of a whole system. Before turning of the light, say, I realize that the gate is going to lock itself, the AC is going to sleep mode and the music will fade out after an hour. However my daughter called me and said she forgot her keys as she went jogging and she would probably prefer the room stay cooler when she comes back. A well coordinated network often fails to read different meaning behind the same gesture rather than supporting the most common scenarios. The safer way to make a “reliable lie”, however, is by inverting one or two words and keeping the rest of sentence unchanged. According to this logic, we would rather to keep some objects in the system more flexible and hackable than others so that the system will not give us away when we tweak it slightly to satisfy our “special needs”.
Third, once location sharing and self tracking services becomes more common ways of social interaction, it will give birth to a new ground of debate.
One may question about the necessity of “exposing oneself” and believe it is something absurd to do spontaneously. However, user experience research about the purpose of using “check-in” service to expose one’s presence has shown that it is a practice that benefits oneself: most people want to keep a history of the places they have been. Intel research lab just revealed a self tracking application as a vacation assistant: we need to keep a journal of the trip but we want to immense ourselves totally in the environment and spend less time documenting, memorizing and jotting. However, the privacy issue behind such practice can be huge one with a fluid boundary between “intention” and “obliviousness”. Also I believe for the most part of future scenarios, the act of exposing our location is a status parallel to services we use that rely on the locational data to function.
Wrapping up…
As pervasive technology finally intervene into our physical presence and , the strategy of telling stories about ourselves need to be adjusted. Defense of one’s privacy may become an increasingly active and spontaneous action, and go beyond the level of verbal curation, into use of diversified digital language and physical indications to communicate one’s identity or presence, especially when it is opposed to the fact. The good news is, the hackable nature of smart things allows for more creative maluse for idiosyncratic goals and purposes. And the bad news is, it takes more effort and tactics to perform the “hacking”. For example, leaving the light on when we leave the house at night is a classic example of “lying about one’s presence”, however, being able to remotely switch on the light to “forge the status” becomes the affordance of networked things. Though we can not switch from place to place within second, but we can use environmental indicators to craft a believable “falseful condition”, messing up the sequence of actual happenings in this example. With the popularization of computational tools for non programmers, however, we can expect easier ways to customize our own smart object, or embedding a specific code of communication with the objects.
On the other hand, as the complexity of interaction in physical spaces increases, the desire of returning back to immobility might be embraced. Locking all the money in one safe does not sound like a plan, but browsing temporal information that you do not want others to track or retrieve may happen collectively and anonymously in a public space. It is a common culture in a lot of Asian countries among high school students that they only surf in PC bars instead of at home or anywhere else. Sometimes being totally public is the ultimate way to retain privacy.
Foreseeing the future is always a challenging yet interesting topic. Any description about our future is continuously penetrated by the present and revisited by the past. Our fetish with technology and creation has been challenging ourselves for centuries and keeping us restless with changes – strange, surreal, painful and self absorbed- and they collide with our animal nature and stubborn habits. Either to evolve to adapt, or to give away ourselves. Choosing the privacy over publicity is condition of being human. And another condition here, which will allow us to tap into the unknown and keep us secure, is making lies. Lying in such sense, is less about something vindictive, but a defensive human action through the adaption to new encounters.
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* The last part about “ubiquitous technology” and “identity play” is the focus of my thesis study, that requires more elaboration and further research. My current arguments may serve as a framework for me to dig further into the subject, rather than a finished statement of the prospect situations.
