Page 73 - Culture Technology Communication

58 Steve Jones

relatively easy to store, will every message we send and receive find
a place in some great universal archive? In place of gossip and
hearsay, features of community, we find control and manipulation,
features of compunity. These issues have followed the development
of each new communication technology, from the advent of writing
and printing, through the invention of television, when we thought
others would see into our living rooms via the picture tube, and are
symptomatic of a larger social issue, namely the ebb and flow of the
boundary between public and private. To borrow from Walter Ong,
what drives our concerns is the seeming permanence of methods of
communication beyond the oral. As regards the spoken word, once
something is uttered, it is also lost to all but memory, and as we have
become less trusting of our own memory (illustrated by brisk sales of
Dayrunners, personal organizers, etc.) we also become inversely
more trusting of our ability to deny that which was once spoken as
having been misheard, misrepresented, misinterpreted or simply in-
correctly remembered.
In essence, our privacy concerns are based on the need for exter-
nalizing (or commodifying), in a more or less permanent fashion, in-
formation about ourselves. It too needs to travel, to be transported,
and it needs to do so independently of us. We cannot be in more than
one place at a time, but social relations, particularly ones formed and
maintained by bureaucracies, demand that we be. And once informa-
tion about us is external to us, it is also out of our control, just as the
picture once taken of us is no longer ours but the photographer’s.
It is important to note that one perspective on privacy issues
runs parallel to what Jean Baudrillard (1983) has written in regard
to the hyperreal, the “realization of a living satellite,” in which “each
person sees himself at the controls of a hypothetical machine, iso-
lated in a position of perfect and remote sovereignty, at an infinite
distance from his universe of origin.” Our privacy is to a large degree
not based on the need to control what is “inside” us already, but to
control what escapes us and enters domains other than our own “pri-
vate,” and to conversely control that which does enter our own pri-
vate sphere. Internet technologies are the electronic component (and
a natural evolution of the telephone) to the triumvirate of technolo-
gies of the Fordist project of suburbanization. The first component
was the development of the modern house, removed from the street,
fenced off (and in some cases within gated communities) from others.
The second component was the automobile that allowed movement
along a physical network of roads and highways that managed to
provide access to places outside the house while maintaining mini-
mal contact with others. The metaphor of the Internet as “informa-