Throughout the course of history, there have been many times when letters have been discovered posthumous which were written by a jurist, scholar or public official which contained controversial personal testimony or ideas far too radical for their time. That was a time when the original document or letter could not be reproduced in a way that could guarantee the authenticity of the reproduction. Meaning, people could write letters to colleagues, friends or even enemies across the country and the chance that the writing would ever leave the hands of the original recipient was very low. And furthermore, the chance that anything personally damning could be spread throughout the media was even lower. No longer is this the case.
I cannot fully express in this post how much that has changed. It has been a seemingly subtle and largely unseen transformation but it is inexorably fundamental to the core principals of how we communicate. No longer is communication, in any form, guaranteed confidential. Yes, some people have confidentiality notices on emails, or expect that “private messages” on websites are indeed private, but they are not. And not just because these messages often get stored indefinitely by a third party, but because in many cases these communications are stored, indexed, searched and cached - Indefinitely. Twitter posts, Facebook posts, blog entries, email list messages (yes, many email listservs are indexed and cached in Google) are often if not always available in search results. And forget all of the emails, IMs, text messages and private/direct messages that are private yes, but stored without any policy as to their lifespan on third party servers.
In fact, search engines like Google cache (save old revisions) almost all of the content it indexes for its search, and there are many companies, organizations and movements gaining traction to track and save as many revisions and history of all online content for historical purposes.
This means that everyone in our culture is held to an astonishingly high degree of accountability as to everything they do or say. 150 years ago, or even less, you could not play a video, a sound recording, or show a snapshot of a website against one from another time. Now, socially critical TV shows, radio shows and websites routinely show a sound bite from two years ago in one context next to a sound bite of another context, seemingly showing the person ‘flip-flopping.” And what is the implication of this?
Well on the positive side, it creates accountability for anyone, especially public officials. It’s easy at this point in time, to ‘check the record’ to see what was really said or done in any past situation. And in reference to tracking online content, it provides a fascinating look into the progression of information and human culture. Both excellent benefits, however, there is a downside.
I’ll call this downside it intellectual superficiality. This is the state of affairs, which we are currently in, which fundamentally started with the photograph or photocopier, where one must start to grapple with the fact that anything written, said or done, may at some point be exactly reproduced, and could come back to them in such a way that could easily be spread quickly via online audiences. How thoughtful and upfront do we expect each other to really be?
Is it possible that these advanced forms of communication are actually creating a culture that doesn’t value thoughtfulness, honesty or disclosure in all aspects of life, but perhaps favors plausible deniability and vagueness instead? And what does that mean for the future of technology and communication and the concept of what is private versus what is public?
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