I want to catch up with a relative. Email, texts, a phone call or two helps. I am curious. I check if her name pops up on the web and then, in a trice, I hit Google Images to see what pictures of her have hit the ‘net.
She is not there.
But what is alarming are photographs of her 5 grandchildren during a recent holiday. She had proudly put them on her Facebook page to show family and friends.
The photo is ‘out there’ linked to her name as the provider.
So, when you type in her name…forever…those five grinning little kids will be there for whomever, for whatever, for whenever. The alarming news is she does not know about it. She has no control. Probably never will. Probably, the little children’s parents will not know either (until they read this and get an inkling).
Yes, I can safely say that that specific photograph of the boys and girls will probably never lead to harm or danger. It will just exist hanging there in an eternal summer on a cottage porch. And all because this woman wanted to show folks her grandchildren on social media.
But this anecdote does illustrate just how we really don’t know what happens to material we don’t really want to be ‘out there.’
As things become more connected, personal control, you see, lessens.
The professionalised internet is serious stuff. It grows incremently without regulation nor control. For good and bad.
For instance, there is the incessant gabbling world of blogs. Any of us who have ever had something printed (knowingly or unknowingly) on the net in any form know about the trolls and anonymous geeks who grab onto your stuff like a nameless fungus.
They are the unidentified people usually who would never come up to you in a pub or the street to tell you how terrible, how lousy your work is. At least if they did that, they would be big enough to tell you. No, they would rather do it ‘dark’.
As a matter of fact, The Financial Times recently reported that the Urban Dictionary summed up ‘trolling’ as ‘…being a prick on the internet because you can.’
It is lazy, it is spineless and it is rampant. It doesn’t illuminate. It doesn’t create. It doesn’t help. Actually, more and more media outlets now demand that anonymity cannot be part of a digital debate. In that FT article, author John Sunyer quotes Huffington Post boss Arianna Huffington as saying:
‘I feel that freedom of expression is given to people who stand up for what they say and (are) not hiding behind anonymity.’
The publication now demands real names for reactive blogs.
Even the overwhelming Google operation, which linked up my relative’s innocent Facebook pictures with its vast Image section, is worried.
It is looking at, according to the FT, demanding proper identities before the more ferocious comments can be posted. Many, it seems, want more protection, more regulation: the white heat of technology outstrips the pace of law and this is becoming more and more apparent each day.
Development in the e-world is just too fast and some people get caught, hurt, poisoned by the gap between unfettered distribution of information (words and images) and the ability to protect privacy.
For those who like a good read, The Circle by David Eggers, is a black comic novel about a fictional social media company that does not such much get out of hand as allowed to run rampant to the point of fascism.
One character in the novel warns: ‘..If you control the flow of information, you can control everything. You can control most of what anyone sees and knows. If you want to bury information…that’s two seconds work… If you want to ruin anyone, that’s five minutes’ work…’
OK, a funny and satirical novel, a work of fiction. But worth a peek to see what an unfettered future might bring.