In this blog post, I wish to question two ideas of affordances granted by today’s technologies that are mentioned in chapter 3 of Deumert’s book: control over the presentation of self and anonymity. Although this may have been a little bit true back in the day of the old read-only internet and chat-rooms, the advancement of technologies seems to reveal quite a bit about us.
The first thing that comes to mind is the loss of privacy for regular people (not public figures). With both its positive and negative sides, the speed at which we are able to share information about us and the people we know can make it harder to proofread, edit and frame any content that we put out there: pictures on Facebook that we do not wish to be tagged in (http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/technology-science/technology/facebooks-drunk-photo-filter-should-4792308), posting tweets and status updates in rage or while intoxicated that we end up regretting (http://politwoops.sunlightfoundation.com/user/realDonaldTrump), or sending a wrong attachment to a wrong audience (http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2013/10/iowa-ta-accidentally-emails-sexually-explicit-photos-to-students/). We might be able to control some of the content we upload ourselves, but the frequency at which we do it can obviously inflate simple mistakes to catastrophic proportions. With today’s technologies, it is fathomable that even the most careful individuals sooner or later will end up divulging some part of their life or a personality trait they wish they hadn’t.
Second, the use of technologies in various new ways on a more macro level can indicate certain characteristics of groups and societies that we have not been aware of up to now. For example, smartphones are sometimes said to control people, and that people are attached to their phones like no other object before (when people frequently check their phones or spend a lot of screen time daily). Along the lines of the constructivist view, I like to think that we use new technologies in order to make many aspects of our lives easier to handle. A simple example is when people in elevators look at their phones all the time. Perhaps it has very little to do with how easily we get bored or how little face-to-face interaction means to us. It might just point to the fact that standing in a small confined space with strangers is an uncomfortable situation and we appreciate a distraction.
Another way in which technology is killing privacy, for better or worse, is that it is making it easier to become famous (at least briefly like in the case of Ken Bone http://www.salon.com/2016/10/15/the-rise-and-fall-of-ken-bone-this-is-what-happens-when-real-humans-become-internet-memes/). What is even more important, in my opinion, is what those occurrences say about human condition, about our curiosity and inquisitiveness. In the case of Ken Bone, for example, an undecided voter who asked a question during the second presidential debate, it would be interesting to look at what the online data (comments, tweets, etc.) say motivated people to raise an anonymous character to stardom, and why was it so easy to forget about him.
Although online communication is not as quick and direct as face-to-face conversation, the advancement of technology is making it faster and more ubiquitous every day. What once were “emotions recollected in tranquility” (William Wordsworth) can now be impulsive fragments of ill-phrased thoughts that are only slowed down by our (in)aptness in typing. Though there seemingly exists a certain amount of control in the presentation of self that one can have online, technology is making it easier to proliferate the production of content, thus making it harder to filter the very content we create.
