Recording each other for justice

Each Saturday, a recurring conflict takes place outside of an abortion clinic, a conflict that sheds light on how media technologies raise questions about the ethics of surveillance and privacy. It's a good example of how these issues are not just about how governments and corporations monitor citizens and consumers, but how these questions arise from interactions among citizens. My understanding of precisely what occurs around the abortion clinic is based on anecdotal evidence, so take everything in this entry with a grain of salt. This is one of those phenomena that I'd love to devote more time to understanding, if only I had the time. There is a compelling ethnography waiting to be written about it, one that would be particularly relevant to communication law scholars.

The space outside the clinic is occupied by two groups: protesters seeking to persuade individuals entering the clinic not to get abortions, and a group of people (hereafter referred to as "defenders") seeking to protect or buffer individuals entering the clinic from harassment from the protesters. This particular arrangement of individuals could have occurred long before the advent of digital networked technologies. What I'm interested in is what happens when you add those tools to the mix.

Protesters are often seen using their phones to take pictures of defenders and the license plates of defenders' cars. Protesters are, by law (at least as far as I know), permitted to do this. Both the protesters and defenders occupy a public space, or at least a space that is not "private" in the sense that one's home is private. Protesters are not, as I understand it, allowed to take pictures of individuals entering the clinic, as this would violate their rights to privacy as patients of the clinic. Even though they are not yet inside the clinic, if they are on the clinic's property and they are patients, their rights to privacy extend to the area around the clinic. If defenders believe that protesters are engaging in unlawful picture-taking, the defenders will use their phones to video record the protesters taking pictures.

Predictably, tempers occasionally flare, voices are raised, people get in each others' faces, and when behavior that approaches the legal definition of harassment or assault occurs, everyone starts recording everything with their phones. The image of extremely worked-up people wielding cameras as one would wield a weapon, recording each other recording each other in a kind of infinite regress of surveillance, strikes me as ludicrous, partly because the act of recording someone with your phone makes you appear passive, somewhat nerdy, and almost...dainty.

What is the point of all this recording? In most cases, the intention seems to be to catch others in an act of law-breaking, to create a record of evidence to turn over to the police that could be admissible in a court of law. But in other cases (e.g., the protester's pictures of defenders' license plates), the intent seems to have little to do with the actual law. The police would have little interest in the license plate numbers of law-abiding citizens. So, why are they doing this, and what happens to these pictures?

Enter social networking sites (SNS). The pictures, as I understand it, are subsequently uploaded to a SNS group page which contains a collection of pictures of defenders and their license plates. It is possible for SNS users to make such groups "secret" and/or invitation-only, so that the groups could not be found by those in the pictures. My understanding is that this leads to those who are in the pictures disguising their identities online so as to infiltrate the secret groups, acting as moles.

But what is the point of developing these online inventories of people who are defenders or protesters or, for that matter, publicly state any particular belief? Is all of this just an intimidation technique? And if so, is it effective? Is there a kind of panoptic logic at work here, in which the fear comes from not knowing precisely who will see those pictures and in what context they will be seen (e.g., by a would-be employer 20 years from now)? Are they using the pictures as part of a concrete plan to take action against the individuals in the pictures, or is it not that well thought-out? Do people taking pictures and amassing inventories like this do so because they imagine that someday, the law will change, or collective sentiment will change, at which point it will becoming damning evidence that one was affiliated with a group that is then seen as abhorrent? Is it akin to a German taking a picture of a Nazi sympathizer in 1939, banking on the fact that while being a Nazi at that time was socially acceptable, it would not be so for long, and that when it became unacceptable, the picture could be used to discredit or blackmail the person?

I don't think this phenomenon is relegated to protesters or defenders of abortion. I often think of it in a much more benign context: traffic violations. Let's say I were to record individuals making illegal U turns (or not using their fricking blinkers). The police may not be interested in my small-stakes vigilantism, but what if I were to start to amass an online inventory that included recordings of lousy drivers caught in the act, and the database included their license plates and pictures of their faces. The judgment here isn't taking place in a court of law. It's a kind of public shaming via peer-to-peer surveillance.

Aside from questions of motivation, the phenomenon raises questions of legality and ethics. It's my understanding that it is okay to take pictures of other individuals in public places, and/or their cars and license plates, and post those pictures online as long as the individuals and cars were in public. Perhaps at some point, were someone to take thousands of pictures of someone leaving their office everyday, it becomes an illegal activity (stalking), but I imagine the line to be blurry (are two pictures okay? Is it only not okay when you've been told to stop?). But what if you only take a single picture of an individual in public, and that individual isn't breaking the law, but you put that picture together with pictures of many other people engaged in a similar activity in an effort to publicly shame them or intimidate them? That seems illegal, but how do you prove what the effort or intention really was? Would it qualify as defamation?

Maybe it hinges on whether or not someone is a public figure. If a protester was quoted in a newspaper or their picture was on the front page of the New York Times, then this seems like fair game. The individual in the paper might suffer negative consequences as a result of being widely known for his quote and his behavior, but what are we supposed to do, not allow the press to depict protesters? What if a blog quoted a protester and featured a picture of him? Functionally, the blog isn't much different than the newspaper, and the lines between the two are blurry. The case of the protester quoted in the New York Times is realistic but rare, whereas there will likely be a great many quotes and pictures on SNS of people stating all sorts of beliefs and doing all sorts of things that may be worthy of judgment to some people at some time.

Even if we decide it fits into a certain legal or ethical category, this may not matter if the behavior remains secret, if technology enables it but doesn't bring it to the surface (i.e., the problem of policing secret inventories).

One possibility is that the law has simply been outstripped by technology. In place of the law, people respond to unethical uses of technology with, you guessed it, more technology. In this case, technology developers make it harder to take surreptitious pictures of people by making it difficult to turn the camera shutter sound off on camera phones. Other tech developers have engineered clothing that reflects light back at cameras in such a way that renders their images invisible. It could be argued that we have been living in a world in which every step of the justice system now functions through technology outside of traditional channels of justice administration, and that the best thing we can do is acknowledge that reality and consider how best to create an ethical world given the imperfect state of things, at least for the foreseeable future.

What Does Everyday Media Use Look Like? (and why this might bias our perception of digital media's effects)

Two brief anecdotes:

1: I’m sitting in Railroad Park in Birmingham, enjoying a breezy, temperate Saturday morning. A few folks pose for a photo that someone else takes with a smartphone. I guess I notice these people first in part because I cannot take a picture with my smartphone - the camera in it is broken. There is nothing like being robbed of something that you have taken for granted to get you to notice it more and to think about it more. I see a few other people in the park typing messages on their smartphones. Other people talk to one another face-to-face. Others stand around and take in the landscape, pet other people’s dogs, read a magazine or a book. And here I sit, typing on a laptop. What do we look like to each other? What kinds of assumptions might we be making about each other based on what we're doing in a public place with or without media technologies?

2: I'm enjoying a beer and a musical performance at Band of Brothers, a new brewery here in Tuscaloosa. The beer, the music, and the general vibe are all great. At the end of the performance, the lead singer, an elegant, attractive, charismatic young woman sits down at a table near the stage, gets out her smartphone, and seems to instantly transform herself into a zombie, hunched over a tiny screen that illuminates her dead-eyed stare.

It isn't hard to find people who are concerned about excessive media technology use (in particular excessive smartphone use). The most popular books about digital media use and the most popular articles take a pretty dim view of it. If there was a utopic moment in the history of such technologies, that moment seems to have passed. This recent commercial for Cisco feels like a relic of a time before we became so deeply suspicious of digital media (perhaps it's a response to that suspicion. Why else would we need a "pep talk" about the virtues of technology?). 

Where do we get these ideas about media use? Or: why are we so keen to agree with, and so reluctant to question, those who provide anecdotal evidence of its ill effects?

Often times, we are heavily influenced by our direct observations: we look at the people around us, the students in our classes, the family members at our cookouts, the friends at parties, the kids at our friends' houses, and the people in the park. Direct observation informs our intuition, and we seek out confirmation of that intuition in the books, blogs, articles, and documentaries we consume.

I've been thinking about how the relationship between our typical first-hand observations of media use and the actual fact of media use (regardless of whether or not it is observed by others) has changed over the years, and how this might influence our opinions of media use and its effects and may, in part, account for the dystopic view that seems to be dominating public discourse on the topic. 

One change: media use has become more public, and hence more visible. People watched a lot of TV before, teens used instant messenger a lot before, but they engaged in these activities mostly in their own homes. The ascendant variety of media use, mobile media use (primarily smartphones), is much easier to observe than TV use or AIM use on a home computer. Thus, we may think that there is a lot more media use going on than there was before, but this may be distorted by the fact that it is simply more easily observed. Evidence suggests that average screen time is increasing, but by the way people talk about digital media, you would think we spent very little time staring at screens before the smartphone, or that smartphones have doubled the amount of time people spend looking at screens (the real change in average screen time among Americans over the past 4 years is probably around 7%).

There are, of course, older media that are used in public: books, newspapers, and magazines. But there is an important difference between print media and smartphones: in the case of print media, it is easy for observers to know precisely what the print media user is reading while it is difficult for observers to tell what users are doing with mobile media. Observers cannot see the screens of smartphone or tablet users; even when observers physically can see the screens, there is an expectation that they do not look too closely at them. So, observers know that the other person is using media but they don’t know how they are using it: work email, liberal news, conservative news, nearby places to eat, connecting with family members on social media, bragging on social media, looking up how to build a bomb, how to build a raised-bed garden, etc.

What they are doing with media really matters. If they’re being social and supporting others while staring at the plastic rectangles in their hands, then this is very different than obsessing over how many people like what they've just posted on social media, and both these things can be done on the same website or application (e.g., Snapchat, Facebook, Reddit). There is such a broad range of activities in which a public media user could be engaged. My sense is that an anxiety arises simply because observers know so little about others that they share space with.

Then there's the question of what people would be doing if they weren’t using their phones. How do the particular activities in which they are engaged on their smartphones stack up to those other possibilities? If they weren't engaged in those media use activities, would they be talking to other strangers face-to-face? Would they be reading a magazine? Would they have spent time in deep, productive contemplation? Would they have stood there and dwelt on a mistake they made the day before? Would they have stayed home and watched TV? I ask these questions not in a rhetorical sense, to assert that the fear and resentment so many feel about media use is exaggerated. I raise them because I honestly don’t know, and that I believe that one cannot honestly say whether the fears about increased screen time and smart phones are justified or not without evidence that speaks to these questions. 

What about witnessing the media use not of strangers, but of someone more familiar to us: a friend, spouse, parent? Our observations of strangers are largely free of interpersonal influences; whether two people at the park talk to one another or ignore one another and stare at their smartphones doesn't directly affect our interpersonal relationships with them or anyone else. It's simply a snapshot of behavior in our society. When we witness the media use of someone with whom we have some sort of relationship, there is an emotional component to our judgment of their use. Commonly, we compare their media use to one particular alternative: having a good conversation with us.

This view ignores other alternatives. If they didn't have a smartphone or laptop, perhaps they would have elected to watch television, or would have elected to leave the room and call a friend on a landline phone in the other room, or would have read a book, newspaper, or magazine. Perhaps we would have had all of their attention instead of some of it, but perhaps we would have had none of it. We only see that they are not talking to us, which is something we wouldn't see and be reminded of if they were not in the room with us.

Compare the experience of sharing a room with someone you know while that person uses a smartphone to the experience of watching TV with someone you know. In the case of the TV-watching friend, we know what our friend is watching; we're watching it, too. In the case of the digital media user, we're likely to fear the worst when we can't see what the other person is doing on their smartphone or laptop, and the fear (of not really knowing this person and what they're up to) likely has a greater impact on us when it is a close friend, spouse, child, or parent. TV can spark conversation, but then again, so can smartphone use. During my casual observations of smartphone use at bars and coffee shops, I've noticed frequent "screen sharing" behavior in which phone use serves as the impetus for conversation rather than an alternative to it. I've also participated in such "phone-aided" conversations at home with my wife.

When we see other people using smartphones and laptops, we feel ignored. We often compare the situation to ideal alternatives rather than making the effort to determine what the likely alternatives might be. We don't think about what the person is doing with the media (often because the expectation of privacy prevents us from knowing this). When we see the elegant, charismatic performer transformed into a hunched-back zombie, we feel a visceral repulsion. This is what we do by default. We then seek out justification for these feelings in anecdotes, books, articles, documentaries, etc.

Making any sort of correct judgment about the impact of media technologies on society necessitates that we recognize the ways in which we respond emotionally to the sight of other people's media use. By the looks of the most popular opinions on smartphone and laptop use, many of us have yet to take that step.

The Awkwardness of Walking a High School Hallway (or, Digital Tribes: Gamers, Socialites, and Information Seekers)

This thought came to me while reading this New York Times article on app makers' attempts to understand how teens use smartphones and what they want out of the experience. In particular, I was struck by this sentence: "And when your phone is the default security blanket for enduring the awkwardness of walking a high school hallway, it feels nice to have a bunch of digital hellos ready with a swipe."

I thought of my own experience in high school. Indeed, it was awkward. I didn't have a phone as a security blanket. I suppose I just thought about the things that mattered to me as a way of escaping the awkwardness. I thought about the video games I'd play when I got home, or the movies or music I loved. Social media didn't exist. Maybe I thought about hanging out with my friends the following weekend.

Also while reading this sentence, I thought of my nephew (age 9) and niece (age 5). They're both too young for social media and smartphones, but I started thinking about what they'd be like when they are old enough to use these things. My nephew is already enamored with video games, in particular Minecraft. It seems unlikely that he'll be a heavy user of social media, and very likely that he'll spend a lot of time playing video games. My niece plays video games, and I honestly am not sure whether she'll stay interested in video games and/or develop an intense interest in social media, like many middle school and high school girls.

But as I read this article, and as I imagined how my nephew and niece would use media when they get to high school, a picture started to emerge in my head, a picture of at least two, maybe three, relatively distinct "tribes". One tribe spent most of their screen time using social media like Instagram or Snapchat. Another tribe spent most of their screen time playing video games. Of course, there would be some overlap: the gamers wouldn't totally forsake social media, and those who spent a lot of time with social media would also play some games. But they would differ in terms of how these media experiences fulfilled some fundamental needs or desires, how digital media provided a kind of default security blanket for them during the awkward teenage years.

For the gamers, video games would deliver a sense of challenge and accomplishment, and sometimes a sense of esteem (others see what you've accomplished and admire you). They also would provide camaraderie via the community of gamers.

For the social media users (let's call them "socialites"), social media would deliver a sense of social support and esteem, evidence that people are paying attention to you, that people like you, that you're not alone.

And perhaps there would be a third group: information seekers/entertainment consumers - people who use media primarily to consume rather than interact; consume news, consume educational material, consume movies, music, etc. I think I was one of these types of people in high school, and I think they still exist in high schools. Some kids aren't that into gaming or social media. They love movies, music, books, etc.

These are distinct groups driven by distinct desires. This brings me back to the Uses & Gratifications theory, a theory that I'm not too fond of (because I don't think people are very good at reflecting on why they use media), but might be of some use to help determine what the positive or negative effects of media might be.

So what? Why do these categories matter?

Well, for light-to-moderate users, all of these types of media use might help to keep young people happy and engaged with the world around them, give them a sense of belonging and fulfillment. The particular kind of media use that provides that sense of belonging and fulfillment won't be the same for everyone.

What about heavy media use? Well, heavy use is probably bad for all groups, but bad in different ways. For those in the social tribe, heavy use would be associated with a kind of fragile ego and need for validation from others, and preoccupation with this validation. For gamers, heavy use would be associated with not caring about accomplishments in the real, non-game world (i.e., not caring about grades, not caring about social connections with real-world peers, not caring about one's health, etc.), a kind of disappearing into the game world. For information seekers, heavy use might be associated with a kind of "filter bubble" problem: they get further and further into a particular view of the world without being forced to see messages from other perspectives or without interacting with people who, inevitably, will hold at least slightly different opinions.

If you just measure "internet use" or "smartphone use" as they relate to these outcomes, you might not find any effects, simply because the lack of effects in the other two groups "washes out" the significant effect in a single group. That doesn't mean the effects aren't there. By differentiating among these tribes (not necessarily by asking young people how they identify, but by measuring their actual use of video games, social media, and information/entertainment consumption), we would be able to see these different effects.

I'm usually quite skeptical of metaphors used to describe media technologies. Such metaphors tend to highlight the ways in which media technologies are similar to something else while ignoring all the ways in which it is not, and they seem chosen chiefly to support the pre-existing beliefs of the metaphor user. Do you think that a new media technology is harmful? Liken it to cigarettes or crack cocaine. Think that it's benign, or even helpful? Liken it to chess or painting or family.

But the security blanket metaphor seems a bit less...deterministic than these other metaphors. Of course, if one were to take it literally, it does have a negative connotation: the image of teenagers clinging to blankies evokes a kind of pathological arrested development, kind of like a pacifier. But what I like about the metaphor is that as long as you don't take it too literally, it helps you think about what young media users get out of the experience - security, comfort - and, at least for me, it doesn't dictate that this gratification come from a particular type of media experience.

What are you doing on that phone?

I wrote a sort of stray observation in the conclusion of my dissertation about a certain attribute of new media technologies: the way in which screens on portable technologies are typically oriented to face toward the user and remain obscure to others. The concerns over privacy vis a vis these media relates primarily to strangers (e.g., governments, corporations) knowing very private things about us and possibly using them against us. But in another way, these devices give us more privacy, privacy in our immediate physical surroundings. The screen orientation makes it harder to see what someone is watching, reading, or doing on their device, but what's more, there is an expectation that others not snoop and try to see what the user is watching/reading/doing.

I've been thinking about this, thinking about how it relates to the fact that we consider it to be rude when others are not paying attention to us but paying attention to their devices instead. I'm not talking about the moments when interaction is clearly expected (e.g., a job interview, a first date). Most of our lives are made up of moments where we are in the presence of others that we could converse with, but that it is not explicitly expected: hanging out with old friends, a lazy Sunday afternoon with a spouse. I think that part of the reason it feel can so alienating or discomforting to be in the presence of someone who is using a device is precisely because we do not know what he/she is reading/viewing/doing.

Here's a counter-example: someone you're hanging out with is reading a book. They're not talking to you, and you can't see precisely what they see (as you would if you were watching TV together), but you know the type of experience he or she is having. With a book, we know where we stand. We know what we're competing with. There is a sense of the psychic distance between ourselves and the person with which we share physical space. With a phone or a laptop? The person could be doing work, seeking out a better-looking partner than you, reading that website you hate, or that one that you love. I suppose that part of the anxiety comes from the fact that even if they're doing something you don't like, you can't do anything about it because you must respect their privacy.

There are ways to test this effect. It would probably work best with significant others, who have a long-term relationship and incentive to stay on each other's good sides and probably have some existing feelings regarding the other person's behavior. Get one person in a room with another who is either reading a book or a magazine, or get the person in a room with another who is on a phone or laptop. You could even have them in rooms with people using tablet PCs that are in one of two orientations: in the first condition, the screen is visible to the other person in the room; in the second condition, the screen is not visible to the other person in the room. Do the levels of anxiety or social exclusion (and the feelings of pain that come with it) increase when someone shares a room with a person using media technologies and they cannot see what the person is doing with those technologies?

If this turned out to be the case, then maybe we need to refine our media use etiquette rules. It's not necessarily a problem when people use digital devices around one another, and even if it is, it's probably unrealistic to expect people who live with one another to abstain from using digital devices around one another for long periods of time. Instead, perhaps we need to have more shared screen time. This is likely the idea behind technologies like Wii U or Chromecast: trying to give us the shared experience that television gave us while maintaining the interactivity and expanded options of the Internet. The only issue might be that we're left with an age old problem: who holds the remote? Who decides on the shape of the shared experience?

Maybe that's the trade-off. In order to avoid the social exclusion that comes with absent presence, we must relinquish some degree of privacy and control over our experiences.