The Transmogrification of Self: Surveillance, Privacy, and Personhood

-- By SylvieRampal - 03 Mar 2009

The Bogeyman is Watching (for your own good).

Orwell’s Big Brother bogeyman and the inhumane convenience of Huxley’s Brave New World have arrived. The current landscape is surreal in the abstract, and very much like science fiction: In the name of convenience and information gathering people are electronically surveilled. They are hounded by “sensors that record identities and the times and places of transactions” , “satellite navigation system[s] …pinpoint exactly where…[people are] on the planet” , and a general “convergence of many commonplace electronic devices and networks that collect information about [the citizenry]” .

The Digital Self as a Threat to Privacy and Personhood

The data revolution has changed identity—expanded how the private self can be monitored and recorded. The “practical terms of our identities are defined by ‘data elements’ . . . Social Security numbers and addresses . . . mothers’ maiden names . . . the things we buy . . . the way we use our credit cards” . The feared communist tyrannies of the past have fallen, but in their wake a new democracy has emerged; one which, aided by commerce, can know the very thoughts of its citizens and in knowing them, (because to know is to control) control these thoughts and those who hold them. In the end, “[t]he Controllers realized that force was no good”. In the same way that Huxley’s dystopia changed what it meant to be human—by eradicating the human struggle and thereby eliminating human dignity—so too does this surveilled world change the notion of personhood: what is inherently our own, what pieces of ourselves do we own and which no one can appropriate, what right do we have to be let alone.

Curtain-ripping

Privacy is the life-blood of distinct personhood. What freedom exists in a world that demands, by the denial of privacy, that our private and public selves be the same, that doesn’t allow us the privacy to more fully develop our core self and inner realities. In Testaments Betrayed, Kundera says, “the real scandal was not Prochazka’s daring talk but the rape of his life …private and public are … two essentially different worlds and …respect for the difference is the indispensable condition, the sine qua non, for a man to live free. . .the curtain separating these two words is not to be tampered with… curtain-rippers are criminals”.

The relationship between the citizenry and government has changed. The surveillance, curtain ripping, that was experienced and perceived in totalitarian societies is far less than what is now present in the American democracy. Those societies judged what you said and did, ours (by way of data mining and data profiling) can predict and measure what you think and will do. People are transformed from person to data, from “subject to object”.

The Self as Defined by Intimate Relationships

Surveillance destroys intimacy and lessens personhood. Privacy is essential to the development of emotional trust and intimacy and individuality. It is upon these things—trust, intimacy, uniqueness—that relationships are built; absent them and relationships will remain unborn. We come to know ourselves in the formation of relationships; they define who we are. These relationships are built on shared experience and by the choices we make as to whom and how we reveal ourselves—our past, our traumas, our hopes and dreams. How can any relationship we have be more special and closely bonded than another in a world where the revelation of our selves is not made by choice? Where for the right price we can be known by anyone?

The Personal Narrative: The Stories We Tell Ourselves and Others About Our 'Selves'

The diary that each person keeps of their personal history, their personal narrative, is how they perceive and define their ‘selves’. Bernstein argues that “anonymity enables the exploration of unconventional aspects of the self without fear of retribution”. But anonymity does not merely facilitate identity creation, it is itself a part of identity. If anonymity may be labeled as a state of being unnamed, unknown, invisible, it might also be called the preservation of self. In that, in the digital world those who are known, named, or visible are owned (at least in part) by those who know, name or see them. It is to this facet of personhood that O’Harrow is speaking, when he says “the details about our lives are no longer our own. They belong to the companies that collect them, and the government agencies that buy or demand them” . When people are reduced to data elements, loss of anonymity is loss of self, of our personal narrative and autonomy in creating it. “Our lives are being recorded . . . [i]t is [as if] all of these electronic diaries are being kept by different people”, but “we have no control over the diaries, and we can’t even know what they say about us” .

Reducing people into data elements fragments identity and threatens to define the whole of a person by only a portion or singular facet of their identity. An article on AOL Searcher No. 44177490 , aka Thelma Arnold, said: “Her searches are a catalog of intentions, curiosity, anxieties and quotidian questions” that even occasion to “betray intimate emotions and personal dilemmas”. Personhood is the right to be let alone in these thoughts and emotions.

Seeing the Loss of Ownership and Autonomy

Ownership of the self--how the self is defined, represented, and constructed--has changed. The collection of personal data and data mining have made personhood salable and made the self knowable to outside parties in unprecedented ways. The cost to society is a loss of individual autonomy. As a result, the elements of personhood are diminished. As privacy and autonomy narrow, people feel less secure in the construction and representation of personhood. Society must question the impact of these changes: perhaps some changes can be accommodated after a period of adjustment, but we cannot know which or how until society assesses the nature of cultural changes that have taken place.

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Sylvie, I wasn't sure if you intended for this to be publicly viewable or not. On the theory that you did, I added a comment box.

If I could make one suggestion: it would be very helpful to turn the quotes into hyperlinks where the documents are available online. Right now, it's a bit hard to discern which source each quote comes from.

-- AndreiVoinigescu - 05 May 2009

Sylvie,

I don't say this to be unkind, but I have to confess this paper leaves me more than a little lost. The ideas you are presenting are interesting, but extremely unclear. I think you are arguing that privacy is part of (or tantamount to) personhood, and thus threats to privacy also threaten personhood. If that is your argument, the essay is too wordy and too vague to effectively make your point. (And if that isn't your argument, then it's certainly true that the essay is too vague to make your point). At least part of what you're doing here is just simply stringing together catch phrases about personhood and privacy, which both makes your writing hard to understand and undermines the argument you're trying to make. Better roadmapping of your argument and some aggressive editing would go a long way in making your essay really sing.

-- DanaDelger - 05 May 2009