Like most people interested in social science, I am a social misfit. That is, I have various and sundry habits that upset a certain type of person: I slurp my soup, swear publically, really don’t like ironing my pants, and sometimes I even wear a horrible moustache. These are all forgivable sins, I hope. But for someone like me, it never hurts to have a backup: somewhere where I could go and socialize without my more autistic tendencies getting in the way. Facebook seemed like a logical choice.
First, there are certain terms used in legal contracts that annul the entire point of a contract in the first place. A contract is, by necessity, temporary. For the contract is nothing more than the expression of two or more wills being expressed to make a promise, and to bind themselves with some pre-established penalty. After the will breaks, and the penalties laid out, there is nothing left of the contract. That is, either party may plausibly fail to uphold the contract, and after penalties are laid out, the contract can be renegotiated. So when we hear of words like “inviolable” or “irrevocable”, it is smoke and mirrors: no such things may be claimed by anyone in a genuine contract. When they are asserted, i.e., by the state over its citizens, it is a product of the eclectic bases of law which may or may not have anything to do with social contracts. And the force applied by the state is a special case; nothing “irrevocable” may be claimed by private entities, unless the meaning is, “irrevocable without penalty”.
Facebook’s terms of service tell us that “By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.” Luckily, they weren’t all that serious about use of the word “irrevocable”, since the removal of content leads to the expiry of the license. One wonders, though, what the point of the word may be, especially when conjoined with fun Highlander adjectives like “perpetual”.
My second point requires some priming. Nobody here needs to be reminded that the field of information ethics is defined, in part, by its emphasis upon the importance of privacy. That is, at minimum, a person should be able to have a say how their personal information is shared. There is a distinction, of course, between private information and intellectual property: demographic details are ethically different from music and art, in that art is by definition the stuff that has been intended to be made public, while personal information cannot be presumed to be. With this distinction follows a few ethical implications: while one may ethically share art (in the non-profit sense) without penalty — since that is necessarily in line with its purpose as art — one may not share personal information unless informed consent has been given.
The clauses ask us to re-examine the distinction between art and personal information to see if it hasn’t gone up and dissapeared. No, all we have is “User Content”, which is implied to be “the photos, profiles, messages, notes, text, information, music, video, advertisements and other content that you upload, publish or display (hereinafter, “post”) on or through the Service or the Site, or transmit to or share with other Users (collectively the “User Content”)”. We do not have, here, two categories — one having to do with who I am as a person, the other to do with my silly pictures of my fat cats and failed attempts at flirting online. There is a lumpencategory, where the two run together. Evidently, they claim the right to conflate fiction and reality, and then give that to whoever they want — protests to the contrary notwithstanding. In reassuring language, we are told that Facebook won’t do this or that. “Legally can’t” is absent entirely, not even suitably and reasonably restricted to the few intelligible domains.
I expect this is all par for the course. Certainly the same sorts of thing have been alleged against Deviant Art. My place of work produces a disincentive for innovation by claiming for itself the legal right to any improvements I personally make.
The only solution is to become a nonperson, and keep my art to myself.
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Ben-
Interesting post. I’ve been a member of facebook for about a year and a half now, and I’m often shocked at the content some users post about themselves (although facebook content doesn’t come close to the dirty-laundry heights of Myspace). Because social networking sites are a degree removed from face-to-face contact, users’ inhibitions seem to ratchet down accordingly – not to mention that the different personalities people adopt around different friends become equally accessible to all. And there are second-order privacy concerns as well, given the ease with which pictures can be posted by others without the consent of those appearing in them (from what I’ve seen, not infrequently involving drunken dancing).
Given the lattitude that the facebook user agreement gives the company with users’ data, for-profit info-sharing with corporations for marketing purposes wouldn’t surprise me. (Then again, do users really think the site is “free”?) And, without contractual limits, the only barrier to government use of the data is likely to be the sense of restraint felt by either the government or facebook itself. The government has already demonstrated its interest in social networking websites. And we can’t rule out the possibility that facebook might share its troves with the government voluntarily. For some precedent, Ron Suskind (in his book ‘The One Percent Doctrine’) tells the story of First Data Corporation – one of the world’s largest credit card processors, and parent company of Western Union – who approached the FBI on September 13, 2001, offering to help “in any way it could.” Legally, I think each record search required a warrant – and Suskind agrees, although I’m not well-versed in American search law, and I doubt he is either – but that didn’t stop the FBI from using the data. After reading your post, Ben, I wonder if the cardholder agreements – with their spacious, libertine language – actually permitted that kind of info-sharing. Of course, it’s entirely possible that they didn’t, in which case the precedent is even more foreboding, revealing restrictive contract language as so many toy soldiers.
As for your distinction between “art” and “personal information”, I would think that at least since Erving Goffman we’ve known that self-presentation is often a matter of creative fiction, thus muddying the distinction between art and personal information. But assuming that the distinction holds up, perhaps a certain umbrage might be warranted where personal information is released into the public domain involuntarily, insofar as an expectation of non-disclosure has been violated (although even this desire for non-disclosure may be driven by a desire to craft a quasi-fictional public self). But most of the information collected by facebook is provided voluntarily and indeed trumpeted from its digital rooftops by the users themselves. Honestly, the info might as well be posted in the same format on the front doors of the users’ homes. Any kind of marginal loss of control, outside the stream of facebook users themselves and into corporate (or even government) hands can’t come as that great of a surprise to users. If I post my personal info on a downtown billboard, can I rightfully feel offended when marketing companies start taking notes?
I’ll just leave a quick comment about your last point. It doesn’t escape me that iconography, or the crafting of self-impressions, is an artform.
But that admission doesn’t exhaust the category of “self-information”. There are demographic details, like one’s political affiliations, which one might rather not want one’s employer knowing and documenting. Political affiliations are generally manifest in social identities, and social identity is generally more iconographic than other kinds of identity; and, on pain of incoherance, I should admit that genuine iconography is bound ‘loosely’, i.e., in the same category as art, ethically (though not legally) entitled only to reimbursement for sales, with no apologies for information transfer; and not ‘tightly’, as in our secrets and subjective aspects of our personal identities, which deserve to be taken in confidence (hence facebook provides “limited profiles”, for instance).
But surely this is a very weak concession. I personally make no secret of my political affiliations, but that’s my choice, informed by what I know about my audience and their motives. All other things equal, I can’t complain when my informed choices are documented by unfriendly forces; but I can complain that I was not adequately informed that they legally could be. The credibility gap is the product of a wedge, between what the terms of service state, and what the surface policy implies. And this credibility gap runs right through the notion of “informed consent”.
To blur your analogy, the information that we know about our audience and venue makes all the difference between whether we are talking about billboards or about telephone calls. Whether I’ve made art out of myself depends, crucially, on who I have been led to think my audience is. When we’re in the public square, a person needs no forewarning; when we’re in a private venue, interpretation must be more delicate.
I have to admit to playing the part of devil’s advocate in this thread. I wholeheartedly endorse the value of privacy and its corollary entailment of control over personal information. But I wonder if there isn’t something historically contingent (and perhaps ephemeral) about this value. My purpose in attacking the distinction between your categories of “personal information” and “art” was to unsettle the different normative frameworks you’d attached to each one and perhaps expose something relative, historical, or culturally contingent at their base.
For example, we might (at a high level of generality) trace the general arc of privacy as growing from next-to-nothing in tribal bands, to the modern social landscape of diverse roles and affiliations intersecting within single individuals. This fragmentation of the social landscape – whose pockets might be defined by the information costs of data transfer across network-clusters – seems to lead to a fragmentation of identity, a conventionalized Janus-faced or hydra-like state of being. A fairly trivial example: I might not prefer that things known about me in certain social circles (say, among friends) were known in others (say, at my workplace, or among other friends or family).
My guess is that this type of norm of fragmentation (by which I mean something like ’social fact’) grew up organically as the material substrate of society evolved to permit it. So I don’t see anything inherently valuable or necessary in it. And it seems plausible to me that the modern revolution in information technology will lead to a kind of personality flattening, by which the breadth of identities available to each individual is compressed. (Although, at least initially, the growth of online networking seems to have led to a temporary expansion of identity-breadth, as role-playing became a possibility in relatively anonymous forums like chat rooms or virtual universes such as SecondLife.) At first, we, as socially embedded creatures, create institutions that are modeled on the current state of our values. But, as unintended consequences will, those institutions, once created, feedback and influence the very values that sired them. In this case, the fact of technological mediation between social actors permits the compilation (and cheap distribution) of heretofore “private information”. (And, as your analysis of facebook’s credibility gap demonstrates, perhaps against our will.) The social landscape seems to be re-congealing, and the multiplicity of our identities along with it. We, of course, being creatures born in an age of multiplicity, will resist. But as our institutions generate a new social reality of greater cross-domain permeability – one with material incentives behind it that can overawe our lilliputian resistance (perhaps with the force of protective ‘law’) – subsequent generations born with no frame of reference other than the ambient one may embrace the loss of control and “privacy” that accompany this flattening. And new norms may be born.
Matt, you’re always going to run into trouble when you try to deflate an “ought” by remarking on what “is”. You’d have to start with a claim about the good in order to approach saying something about the moral ought. For example, one might argue that the good is relative to whatever is socially functional, and that privacy, in our times, is dysfunctional, and hence not good. In which case, you surely wouldn’t mind giving me your credit card number, because I have a great many books I would like to buy on Amazon.com…
The word “inherant value” is tricky and your use of it requires explanation. I’m a utilitarian, of course, and that comes with a full-blown theory of intrinsic goods: namely, the theory of hedonism. So of course there’s nothing inherantly (intrinsically?) valuable about privacy. There is only intrinsic value to happiness.
On the descriptive claim, your remarks are in line with the views of Kenneth Gergen. He believes that with the death of modernity (snuh?), comes a gradual decay in the value of identity. The stages of identity decay run as follows: first, one becomes disenfranchised from their social roles (not hard to imagine); next, they reject all notion of essential identity, and view situations as mere opportunities to behave in some way; finally, all sense of self is abandoned for a socially networked view. Gergen sees this ongoing transformation into superficiality and lunacy as a wonderful thing, liberating, etc.
Modernistic identity theorists (and my former profs) Jim Cote and Chuck Levine reply by trying to show how these sentiments are a wide social epidemic that is caused by “high modern” social structures. In an era of marketing, it really isn’t hard to see that identity is a commodity, and that that might make people cynical about the whole idea of identity in the first place. And critiques of this can be found in postmodern circles, too. Some of the finest words written by postmodern philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard can actually be read as poignant critiques of the kind of radical postmodern (downright anti-modern) attitude we might attribute to Gergen. Lyotard blasts the kitschy “anything goes” attitude of the anti-moderns, while at the same time guarding against those more ‘totalizing’ views that are associated with the defenders of modernity (like Habermas). If I’ve understood Lyotard correctly, he objects that both are on their own independently motivated rampages against the avant-garde, and the avant-garde is something Lyotard would like to protect.
I respect Lyotard’s argument, but not surprisingly I sympathize more with Cote. This is all a bubble that we all live in, a sign of excess and indulgence. As you indicate, identity is functional (in the short-term), like much of social life. When the burdens of mass anomie overcome its benefits — say, when too many people pop too many pills, and we go through a depression that makes such commodities scarce — then you’ll see people take identity seriously. The immediate aftermath, of course, would be a takeover by confident pre-moderns who never indulged the siren call of infinite regresses in the first place.
Or we might save ourselves the trouble and think these things through before collectively navelgazing our way into a miserable abyss. If our identities take root in both the past and the future, and we deal with things in terms of a “longer now”, then we’ll surely be the wiser for it. (Somehow I’m reminded of Aronofsky’s “The Fountain” here.)
I can understand the claim that any attack on an “ought†requires a counterpoised value, or claim of the good. But insofar as oughts supervene onto facts, we might be puzzled when two distinct oughts supervene on two factual categories that can be re-conceptualized as a single one (or at least as two that inter-penetrate). In such a case, we might suspect that some sort of historical contingency is responsible, at least in part, for the particular shape of our normative commitments. We’ve been talking about two categories of self-referential information, namely “art” and “personal information”, and I think this state of affairs holds for them. (From here on, I’m excluding administratively-ascribed characteristics like credit card and social security numbers from these categories, and instead focusing on those information bits that shape other people’s conception of our “identity†or “characterâ€, like the things we’ve done or said in the past. The protection of administratively-ascribed characteristics by “privacy values†is likely to be justified – or at least debated – in entirely different terms.) Within our current social reality, gaps in information transfer create a kind of ecology of identity, in which different activity-niches furnish opportunities for multiple forums of self-revelation, -expression, and ultimately -construction. For example, I can cultivate slightly different identities among schoolmates, family members, friends (and subsets of friends), workmates, in the blogosphere, in online virtual worlds like SecondLife or in chat-rooms, etc., by controlling the information I reveal (or fabricate) about myself. This creates room for exploration of alternative selves, unburdened by recursive, self-fulfilling expectations. This might be the kind of “identity decay†described by Gergen, although I have my doubts. The procession I have in mind is not quite so self-conscious. People may become disenfranchised with social roles, and so seek relief in alternative roles (or make them up). While individuals may generate an entire repertoire of identities in the process, I’m not sure what happens can be described as “the rejection of the notion of an essential identityâ€, because within contexts, individuals may experience a very real and singular “identityâ€. And while identities become socially-networked and hence network-dependent, “all sense of self†doesn’t seem to be abandoned. Rather, people seem to peacefully exist with multiples selves, each a felt reality in its context. (Granted, idle moments may cause one to wonder what his or her “essential identity†is.) If this is Gergen’s view (or something like it), I don’t understand what Cote and Levine’s response is (probably because I need you to spell it out for me). [I should also mention that I’m not quite sure what the notion of “modernity†refers to, much less post- or anti-modernity, probably because I’ve only taken one philosophy course in my life.] But regardless of what the critique may be, the thrust of my post was forward-looking, envisioning a retraction of this process by the homogenizing forces of information technology and encircling market forces. And, if it’s possible, I was hoping to make a descriptive claim about normative evolution, one that may be related to the definition of good as social functionality that you offered in your comment: namely, as the range of selves that can be constructed diminishes in response to a thinning of the information-differentials that partition our social landscapes, the desire to control that information will itself begin to diminish. And as the desire to control goes, so may go the value of “privacyâ€, at least within the sphere of information under treatment. And this is what I meant by the non-intrinsic-ness of the privacy value: its value is dependent on the factual context, i.e. isn’t invariant to history. (I should point out that I’m making a descriptive claim about what is (or was) societies have valued, not what I believe should be (or have been) valued.)
It is rarely difficult to pick up a pattern that unites two concepts under the original investigation. This fact, however, is not an argument against the original characterization. It is, at best, a complaint about an excess of semantic distinctions which do not independently make much of a conceptual difference. But in this case, I’ve argued that the art/information distinction ought to be made because it makes a genuine moral difference. They are related concepts, sure, but that isn’t significant to the (first) claim at hand.
I don’t deny historical contingency, social embeddedness, etc. I do deny that it necessarily exhausts our moral judgments, especially not so drastically as to deserve the term “supervenience”. A better argument would appeal to goods somewhere along the line.
Our “administrative” identities are, I take it, a part of our social identities, and social identity is an active part of the discussion. Leaving out the practical domains where ethical problems arise obviously is to simply confiscate me of my (second) point. The root intuition appears to be that identity is achieved, not ascribed; and this way of thinking has at least some theoretical (not empirical) roots in identity literature. But it no good to take the notion of identity as entirely voluntary, as always “achieved” and never in part “ascribed”. If Bob calls Jones a pariah, then that is a question of his identity.
Anyway, if these administrative identities are to be justified in different terms, then I would have to know what those terms are with which justification is being discussed at all. That will require more than a historical acumen; it will require an argument that appeals to the good.
I should apologize for being unclear about Gergen. He doesn’t call it “identity decay”. Quite the opposite, he sees the transformation into the relational self to be a thing to be celebrated. I call his observations “decay” because I think his moral sense is skewed in the wrong direction.
From what I understand, Gergen’s three stages begin with the benign (alienation from roles), and move gradually towards a radical transformation of the entire notion of the self. We lose the ego, and are defined in terms of our social place. Cote and Levine, much like myself, view this end-game to be a bit rich. [I wrote the Wiki on "Identity (social science)", which gives a less prosey and more helpful explanation of Gergen etc.]
The argument you offered just now (re: information-differentials, etc.) sounds plausible on a descriptive level, but normatively more must be established. IE: are people, on the whole, happier for being in identity-flux? Are they as happy as they could be? Is the lasting sense of choice and commitment a good thing, or a bad thing?
nail on the head