Psst. They're reading!

(This article was cross-posted on the Masters of Media blog).

Here’s the final version of my thesis (called ‘Persistence of Life-Streams – An Inquiry Into the Implications of Mixed Surveillance’) which covers the nature and implications of (participatory) surveillance in the field of social media, and specifically in life-streaming services like Twitter and Facebook. (PDF can be downloaded here).

Introduction:

In this thesis, I will investigate the use and organization of so-called ‘life-streams’, a term that is described by blogger John Borthwick as “real time, flowing, dynamic [streams] of information — that we as users and participants can dip in and out of and whether we participate in them or simply observe we are are a part of this flow” (Borthwick, 2009). The life-streams as core interface can be found on different social media platforms, most famously being Twitter, Facebook and the recently introduced Google Buzz.

These life-streams could be seen as the contemporary model for social networking in which relations are instantiated through a data-stream of updates on someone’s activities. The life-stream’s interface, which is called the ‘timeline’ in the case of Twitter, consists of a chronologically ordered list of messages, with users following other people’s life-streams and engaging through dialogue a social relation emerges. Significantly, many of these networks do not all incorporate the term of ‘friend’ at all, opposed to the more traditional social network sites such as MySpace, Friendster or Facebook. The fundamental difference on life-stream environments like Twitter is that users amongst each other don’t necessarily share a mutual relationship. For instance, the Twitter-account of Jesus has over eighty-thousand followers, yet he does not follow back a single user.

Moreover, motivations for participating in these networks can also differ greatly; it could be used to get insight into the public opinion as a politician or to help customers out as a business customer relations service, although it is clearly widely used for sheer fun and personal interests amongst friends. Although these practices are much in favor of pervasive surveillance practices, theorists like Anders Albrechtslund emphasize on the created vertical power-relations of ‘participatory surveillance’, which he describes as “a way of maintaining friendships by checking up on information other people share” (Albrechtslund, 2008).

Furthermore, as researcher Anne Helmond explains in Life-tracing: The Traces of a Networked Life, this kind of willingly engagement can be seen as ‘sousveillance’, a term coined by Steve Mann: “Surveillance is the act of watching performed from above by organizational structures, whereas sousveillance is the act of watching from below by individuals” (Helmond, 2009). In contrast to participatory surveillance, sousveillance seems to focus more on the empowerment by transparency amongst the multitudes rather than on a social function on micro-level.
This openness of very specific personal detail, according to Cnet.com editor Tim Leberecht, with these life-streams as a social (and self-imposed) reality, we now slowly move from ‘privacy’ to ‘sociality’ as the norm:

“Privacy understood as sociality [...] grants us the ability to control who knows what about us and who has access to us, and thereby allows us to vary our social interactions with different people so that we can control our various social relationships at different levels of intimacy.” (Leberecht, 2010)

Also, Leberecht explains that the trust between people on the social network sites like Facebook can’t permit themselves to be exploited by profound regulations imposed companies economically, as the networks run on an enormous collective trust which is otherwise disturbed by a collective distrust in both the system, and consequently the community. However, users themselves are already stretching the boundaries of control they have over the digital applications, mainly since access is granted to third-party developers through an API (or another developer framework) which results in a wide variety of tools that alters the way content is produced and shared throughout life-streams. However, the empowerment of the developers in these frameworks often tends to lead back to the centralized power relations.

By building onto these ideas, I would examine how power is distributed within these life-streaming networks, and to what extent software-specific implementations influence create new modes of surveillance. First I will discuss the medium-specificity of the Web (Qvortrup, 2006) and specifically of life-streams. Thereafter, I will elaborate on two cases wherein privacy issues occurred due to failed expectations of privacy (Nissenbaum, 2004). Later on I will focus on various existing surveillance theories, like the panopticon (Foucault, 1977, Poster, 1990), participatory surveillance (Albrechtslund, 2008), and lateral surveillance (Andrejevic, 2005). Finally I will propose the term ‘mixed surveillance’ as the concept in which values amongst users and corporations intertwine, and the increasingly opaque modes of interaction. Therefore the central question, in this thesis will be: How did participatory surveillance become increasingly integrated into social media (such as life-streams), and what are the implications of mixed surveillance?

Last week I had the opportunity to attend at a symposium held at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society (TILT) called ‘Privacy and Social Network Sites’. The keynote speaker of the day would be dr. danah boyd, who has joined many research groups in the past (‘way back’ to Friendster) and currently works at Microsoft’s Social Media research department. Much of her work as an ethnographer focusses on media use of American teenagers.

boyds keynote was divided in five sections, namely youth practices, networked publics, visibility, privacy and publicity. In the first section, boyd elaborated on how it came to be that youngster felt so attracted to online social networks. One of the driving forces behind this large-scale migration was ascribed to the fact that teenagers were both being pulled toward the commercialized public spaces (for example shopping malls and cinemas) while at the same time being obscured from these spaces due to the possibilities of shoplifting and the public discomforts of hanging groups. Together with an increasingly feeling of insecurity on the parent’s accounts (partly imposed by media and governments), they saw no other choice than to keep their offspring indoors. Thus hanging out simply ends up happening in Social Media.

According to boyd, hanging out in these (virtual) environments is just as crucial as it’s ever been, as it’s a social process of creating meaning of the world around you, and a way to learn about the social world. While the original network sites has been developed for goals other than just ‘meeting up’ (namely either for business networking or for dating), youngsters have developed their practices to create their own social space. What’s noticeable in their use, living double-lives and maintaining invisibility for unwanted audiences has been at times very successful (for example by by setting their age to 100).

In the second section, networked publics, boyd started out by outlining some of the intrinsic characteristics of digital networks. These aspects range from persistence (every expression is automatically recorded and archived), searchability (disclosed content can easily reach large publics through networks), scalability (blogs can be infinitely be indexed even if they’re not actually read) and invisible audiences (not all audiences might be visible or co-present at the moment of posting). According to boyd, these specifics together would’ve cause the social networks to represent a collapsed context since “the lack of spatial, social and temporal boundaries makes it difficult to maintain distinct social contexts”. Eventually, the coming of these fundamental different contexts would also demand a constant adjustment in our behavior.

In the next section, visibility, boyd elaborated on many case studies in which teenagers struggled with their double-lives. One of the named examples was a girl who posted the outcome of a quiz called ‘What drug are you?’, after her father was outraged after finding his daughter being involved in such practices. Fortunately, the conversation that followed turned up to be a valuable one after the daughter explained to him what it meant to participate in such a quiz in a social environment. In another example, a student (coming from Compton) was rejected from a scholarship after the board found his MySpace which was filled with hip-hop and gangster references. In the latter case the board had probably no idea that youngsters in suburbs like Compton have practically no other choice than to adopt these street culture to simply survive.

Thereafter privacy was covered, a term that boyd defined as “control over how information flows”, in social networks this would also mean conveying texts how it is meant, to the audiences it was meant for. In most cases, this privacy is not always just about hiding; the mantra of ‘security through obscurity’ is maybe not a weird start since people seek an audience all the time. Although teenagers acknowledge that their content might be watched by undesirable audiences, the ones that they most fear are the ones with ‘real’ power over them, such as their parents or teachers.

boyd continued that we often have certain expectations of the system’s architecture concerning privacy, and overlook for example the changes terms of use that were recently imposed by FaceBook that privileged publicity by default. In many cases though, people weigh their possible gains and losses while exposing themselves online. In one case, a girl put up very exhibitionistic pictures of herself to become a model in the same way Tila Tequila did. Additionally teenagers rely very much on social norms, meaning that because it’s just out there, it’s not meant for anyone.

In the last section, of publicity, boyd compared two networks (Twitter and FaceBook) in terms of their intended publicity. While on Twitter, people often want to reach a larger audience, FaceBook users tend to prefer a network of people they know, build on mutual relationships. As with the Tila Tequila case: teenagers want to become celebrities, but in many cases overlook the possible social consequences of such a status, for example paparazzi. However, this doesn’t mean that on Twitter people want to bluntly reach the largest possible audience, but more often expand it to the level of “comfort with public”.

Concluding, many teenagers approach social networks as an opportunity to express themselves in disclosed online environments (‘disclosed’ as in amongst friends online), which doesn’t mean the content is meant for anyone. Consequently, parents’ fears of this publicity lies in the fact that they might encounter things they wouldn’t want to see (bullying for example). Noticing these gaps call for education that goes beyond just parents and youngsters, as anticipating to online behavior needs different approaches and insights. With the four intertwining areas that Lawrence Lessig introduced in ‘Code’ – namely market, law, social norms and architecture – we constantly need to reshape the role and place of policy in these networks, and try to understand the profound implications these technologies can have.