People rarely use gossip as a way to delve into the psychological depths of others, but rather consume it like a form of greasy fast food.

This article is part of a virtual reading group for Daniel Solove’s book The Future of Reputation (schedule here).

There is a longstanding argument made against privacy advocates that says someone who isn’t engaged in criminal behavior has nothing to hide. This method of thinking allowed the US government to slowly sap away our civil liberties in the wake of the 9/11 attacks–many have just accepted that trading privacy for security is acceptable and used the “nothing to hide” argument to rationalize what was, essentially, a decision based on fear. However, limiting the government’s ability to intrude in our private lives is easy compared with attempting to control how personal information spreads on the internet via gossip. Rather than spies or wiretaps, gossip is often gathered by those we trust and spread online by people who don’t understand or appreciate the potential for the damage it can do. The second half of Chapter 3 of Daniel Solove’s book The Future of Reputation nicely counters the “nothing to hide” argument by pointing out how personal information can only really be understood in context. Out of context, a person’s secrets are likely to foster snap judgments based on misunderstandings and irrational reactions to social stigmas. (Not surprisingly, Solove is the author of a paper on the subject.) In reality, privacy is about much more than concealing wrongdoing.

From the chapter:

In countless societies, whether primitive or modern, gossip generally functions in similar ways. Gossip is essential to establishing reputations. According to the psychologist Nicholas Emler: “Gossip does not merely disseminate reputational information but is the very process whereby reputations are decided. Reputations do not exist except in the conversations that people have about one another.” Gossip is a way to expose people’s infringements of norms [...]

People used to tuck their diaries away in drawers or lock them up, but now, they are sharing them with the public on the Internet.

An important element of privacy is the ability to conceal issues too complex to be successfully integrated into reputation. Reputation generally contains only information relevant to the context of the relationship: can this person be trusted, are they a good worker, are they honest, will they cheat in a relationship, etc. Too much information can be distracting and can lead to unfair judgments. For instance, a philanderer may still be an excellent employee, which is why hiring laws forbid prying into private and family affairs when considering a candidate for a job.

People are multi-faceted and never ‘bad’ or ‘good’ altogether, but the nature of judging a person’s reputation lends itself to snap decisions. We are fascinated by difference–divergence from norms. The quirky, strange, or downright kinky are always the subject of gossip not because they are relevant to reputation-building in its purely utilitarian form but because they are entertaining. Unfortunately, being outside the norm can almost always have a damaging effect on reputation. More information about an employee or friend is not necessarily a good thing–eventually you will find where that person differs from you or from societal norms. Even though someone is a good friend or employee, knowing what makes them different could certainly strain those relationships. What’s more, we are rarely willing to spend the time during a gossip session to work to truly understand the context for the information we learn about someone else. This problem is only amplified online, where information is absorbed in seconds and often completely without context. Solove says, “when intimate information is removed from its original context and revealed to strangers, we are vulnerable to being misjudged
on the basis of our most embarrassing, and therefore most memorable, tastes and preferences.”

The Internet is transforming the nature and effects of gossip. It is making gossip more permanent and widespread, but less discriminating in the appropriateness of audience. [...] I believe that it is imperative that we do something to address the developments inherent in the marriage of traditional gossip to the technology of the Internet. But what? How do we protect privacy in a world where information is flowing ever more freely, where anybody can publish information to a worldwide audience?

Any ideas?

people’s online social networks may be only an “imaginary” community

Class after class of students come through the small college where I work. They pour out their hearts into the digital blackness and spend their time with socially networked acquaintances; their conversation comes in fast spurts over AIM. Their relationships are increasingly weak and standoffish at the same time that what they reveal of themselves to the public is incredibly intimate. Secrets that they would hate for their parents to see are only a Google search away. Do they realize that those hasty admissions—ideals that will change, relationships that will sour, drunken indiscretions—will all be preserved like fossils in the digital strata for their entire lives and beyond? In a virtual world designed around speed, convenience, and ego, they will loose a sense of what constitutes a strong relationship and their ability to empathize will suffer. At a time when it is easier than ever to find a reason to hate someone, they will be more likely than ever to be willing to hate. How can we—as mentors, as parents, as developers, as netizens—put a stop to this progression?

The Internet is a Cruel Historian

My wife used to write online about our son, who was a baby at the time. Her journal was ‘onymous,’ meaning she made it a point of pride to use her real name. The stories she wrote were the sorts of thing that any parent would share about a baby—harmless amusing anecdotes, pictures, and such. As time went on, we had to think of something that parents before us had never considered. What will our son do when these funny baby stories are still available within seconds of a search when he is in high school? Or when he applies for his first job out of college? Or when he’s middle-aged and looking to distinguish himself in a profession? How will these stories effect his ability to find love or to raise his own children?  Fortunately, she put a lot of thought into where to draw the line on what was shared and what was held back, but many—probably most—parents won’t have that discretion.

Time as a Context and the Usefulness of Forgetting

Our reputation is an essential component to our freedom, for without the good opinion of our community, our freedom can become empty.

Many of us may have had parents who jokingly pulled out the family photo album to show our significant others embarrassing baby photos. It’s a poignant moment, when someone you love can laugh at pictures of you as a tender, vulnerable youth. It never occurs to us that mom may have showed these pictures around her office to near strangers when the pictures were newly made—they weren’t taken for the sole purpose of gathering dust in a photo album, after all. Sharing fun moments is part of the reward of being a parent, but the way we share is changing faster than our consideration for how, why, and with whom we choose to share our personal lives. The internet is ageless and its memory does not dim like a human memory does. The ability for endless lossless copies creates a further complexity.

Yesterday a friend of mine IM’ed me a link to a lifehacker.com article on Adobe’s Zoetrope, which is shaping up to be like the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine. In other words, it’s a second and more robust attempt at archiving the internet and tracking changes across time in a way that will allow a user to browse a website through time with ease. Part of me recoiled in horror at this, and I was relieved that Adobe has not been archiving the internet, nor does it plan to move beyond a few high-profile websites. Still, with computer memory capacity, processing capability, and bandwidth getting cheaper and cheaper, it is only a matter of time before a company like Google—who already caches copies of nearly every webpage it crawls—to maintain a detailed, searchable, and browsable archive.

Part of growing up is the ability to move on—to change social contexts at different life stages. This is an ancient truth: “Whence hath this man this wisdom, and these mighty works? Is not this the carpenter’s son?” Starting fresh in a new place allows a person to re-invent themselves without the burden of memory, and this is especially important for young people. Solove said:

We may find it increasingly difficult to have a fresh start, second chance, or a clean slate. We might find it harder to engage in self-exploration if every false step and foolish act is chronicled forever in a permanent record. [...] As people chronicle the minutia of their daily lives from childhood onward in blog entries, online conversations, photographs, and videos, they are forever altering their futures—and those of their friends, relatives, and others.

I have had several discussions in my office about the need for colleges and high schools to begin counseling students on how they craft online identities and how to use pseudonyms for identity exploration that may come back to haunt them in the future. After all, what is appropriate to share online is still a decision that many adults cannot make intelligently—expecting experimenting teenagers to be responsible for creating immortal reputations online is impossible. Solove says, “For most of us, the foolish things we do as teenagers disappear into oblivion and are revived only when we reminisce with old friends. But in today’s world, foolish deeds are preserved for eternity on the Internet.”

In my case, I was lucky enough to have spent my formative period online before Google and the Internet Archive—the internet did slowly forget my teenage years (thankfully). However, with new tools like Zoetrope and whatever ultimate librarian succeeds it, there is little hope that the information revealed about us online will ever fade. Worse, my colleagues here at Warren Wilson seem totally disinterested, and I imagine the situation at public schools is much more bleak. It seems the ‘Google generation’ will have to fend for itself because too few people today are aware of these issues at all.

The Fallacy of ‘Nothing to Hide’

Daniel Solove asks a sticky question: “Is there a justification for allowing people to conceal information
about themselves that will lower their reputations?” He goes on to discuss what reputation means and how using Google to build an opinion about someone in a matter of minutes is not reputation—at least not in the sense that society has relied on reputation for centuries. One key to reputation is that it is built largely on strong relationships between people who have known each other for a long time—that is the only guarantee that reputation is accurate. The problem with using Google to form an image of a person in moments is that there are only random fragments to draw from. It is foolish to think that we can know something of a person’s reputation from a Google search when a sense of ‘integrity’ would be impossible to convey believably from such a hodge-podge of scanned data. Solove discusses how we are living today in a ‘global village’ in the sense that we have access to all sorts of personal information about each other that used to only be commonly available to members of a small community. He says:

The global village not only revives features of the small village but also amplifies and alters them in profound ways. The global village is worldwide and it encompasses millions of people. The people of the global village have weak rather than strong ties; they are often known not for their whole selves but for various information fragments others hastily consume.

The Social Industry

I have lost the immortal part of my self and what remains is bestial.

My wife and I frequently reminisce about how we met in a CGI chatroom. At the time, the internet was still in its youth, and we formed a relationship from chatting for hours both alone and in a group. That sort of relationship-building happens more and more rarely online. Chatting has changed into Instant Messaging and the way it is commonly used is nothing like the long, soul-searching chats I remember. Social networks are designed to foster a large quantity of shallow relationships between acquaintances. Social networking activities are generally very surface-oriented, topical, and fast. As a result, it is increasingly unlikely that real, deep, and lasting relationships will be formed online. Solove points out, “when little is invested in a personal relationship, even information that is incomplete and of dubious veracity might be enough to precipitate ridicule, shunning, and reproach.”

Relationships mean less on the internet, and damaging someone else’s reputation becomes less serious at the same time that it becomes much easier. At a time when families are shrinking and the support systems that our ancestors enjoyed from community are missing, the internet is doing more harm than good in our social lives by turning socialization into shallow, monetized entertainment. It’s high time we had a social network designed to build real-life, deep connections between people. If we can learn about what it means to live and love meaningfully in a virtual world, perhaps we can better appreciate reputation (and each other) in a virtual context.

cyberspace norm police can be extremely dangerous—with an unprecedented new power and an underdeveloped system of norms to constrain their own behavior

This article is part of a virtual reading group for Daniel Solove’s book The Future of Reputation (schedule here).

‘Hard words break no bones’ is a phrase that has been in use since the Renaissance, but things may be changing. The internet is a realm composed mostly of language, and the process of identity creation that youth go through is thrown into sharp relief when it’s stripped down to words. When teens invest themselves online, they are putting a great deal of value into terms: names, labels, and the power of specialized language to build a sense of community. In a world of interaction and reputation built entirely on words, the old adage is being revised. Online, ‘sticks and stones will never hurt you, but words may break your heart,’ and on the internet, reputation and the damage done to carefully constructed online identities can have devastating ‘in real life’ (IRL) consequences for youth who are already unstable and in need of help.

International Dog Crap

Sometime in 2005, a tiny dog—one of the toy breeds very popular in Asia—crapped on a subway train in Korea. It’s owner, a young college student, refused to clean up the mess. A fellow passenger took a picture with a digital camera and ridiculed her online, unleashing a tidal wave of online activity that made her the center of a moral witch-hunt and an international discussion about privacy. The consequences for the Korean woman far outweighed her poopy faux pas. The stress ended in her dropping out of college and becoming suicidal. The introduction of Daniel Solove’s book, titled “When Poop Goes Primetime,” uses the case of ‘the dog shit girl’ to introduce us to the issues surrounding privacy and freedom of information on the internet. Even if you’re not going to read any of the rest of the book, this first chapter is worth your time.

More below the jump…

More recently, the tragic case of Megan Meier has revealed online emotional abuse as an issue of vital importance. Solove discusses how enforcing societal norms—a common and arguably necessary social force IRL—takes on new and disturbing dimensions online. While not precisely the same as the varied problems of the Meier case, both deal with the issue of ‘public shaming.’ Most of us probably remember occasions in our youth where we were singled out for ridicule because of some difference or infraction. The snickering, finger pointing, and name-calling is usually bearable IRL, and there are safety nets in place for those kids who can’t cope on their own (although the Columbine massacre shows that even our IRL safety nets miss the opportunity to prevent the very real damage possible from social ostracism). However, the power of the internet to draw massive crowds and unite communities has changed the dynamic of public shaming. Where once the class nerd may have had to deal with a handful of tormentors, now thousands or even tens of thousands can potentially participate in the shaming process.

The Internet Hate Machine

How do we allow people to control their personal information
without curtailing free speech or stifling freedom on the Internet?

There is a sizable online youth culture that makes a hobby of ridicule. Sometimes organized for arguably noble purposes—sometimes scorn is necessary, after all—this very loose association of people is mostly just in it for the lulz (for the uninitiated, that’s a nuanced plural of LOL with strong overtones of Schadenfreude). The tamer venues for those who find age-old humor in the misfortune of others include sites like break.com and collegehumor.com, but these sites are generally not much more problematic than the content you might find on youtube.com or the evening news. (Not that youtube.com hasn’t caused its share of problems.) Where the practice of public shaming comes into play in an arguably problematic way is deeper down the rabbit hole, on 4chan, Encyclopedia Dramatica[NSFW], and other sites frequented by what Fox News outrageously termed ‘hackers’ and ‘an internet hate machine.’ It is on these sites, in part, that self-identified members of culture-moniker ‘Anonymous‘ carried out various campaigns that fall under ‘Project Chanology.’ Some of these, such as the actions against Scientology, are carried out with a strong moral sense in mind (for better or worse), and Anonymous as a whole cannot be called ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ really. It is simply / complexly an internet culture. However, some of the venues and individual actions of public shaming read like virtual scenes from A Clockwork Orange.

4chan… I’m not going to try and describe 4chan’s /b/[NSFW]. It’s an imageboard, better known than but similar to 420chan.org[NSFW], 711chan.org[NSFW], and other (English) parts of the Japanese Futaba Channel. Here’s how Digg user Frywater described /b/:

Are you brave? If so, come hang with the most intelligent, most vile, most underground kidz on the net hands down. Chat with hotgirls, professors, artists, pedos, geeks, all at the same time. Have images burned into your head for the rest of your life. Stay long enough, and meet satan himself. youve been warned.

Right. So, contrary to the seeming chaos, things actually do get started on 4chan and its sister sites (see Project Chanology). On a smaller level, these sites have been used by individuals to propegate public-shaming memes such as the Korean ‘dog shit girl.’ The virtual mob leaders who start public shaming campaigns often adhere to an anti-philosophy that is most evident on the humor site Encyclopedia Dramatica[NSFW].

Encyclopedia Dramatica is a Wiki whose mission is simple: “spread the lulz” (read: time for a little of the ultra-violent, my droogies). As part of the fun, authors single out individuals online for strong ribbing (have a look at the Drama Queens or Furries[NSFW], for example). Many of its contributors are intelligent and college-educated, and it’s multi-author approach to dark humor leaves the articles drenched in a pervasive nihilism. For example, frequently the site challenges societal norms with the ironic use of hate language—used in such a way that it ridicules both the haters and the hated—and the articles are often deeply self-depreciating. The overall sense I came away with is that, were the site to have a singular author, that author would have no philosophy, moral, or belief whatever. Even the stated devotion to humor rings hollow, as the site’s long chronicle of lulz seems laced with bitterness and anger. In the end, none of it is real at all—not the humor, not the hate, and certainly not the ever-changing and conflicting sense of normalcy—and that irony may be the site’s only core ideal.

The online youth culture who frequent these venues think that the ‘internet hate machine’ phrase is ridiculous. The hate and ridicule isn’t quite fake, but it’s hardly real either. It’s just trolling. It’s just for the lulz. The problem is, the effect of their complex, nihlistic, mock-hate for the sake of chuckles is the same as real hate.  It’s little different from the high school bully who defends his brutality by saying “I was just pickin’ with him.” Bullying has become more sophisticated as youth have learned to communicate with so much more than their mouths and fists, but public shaming doled out for lulz is no less damaging for its sophistication and use of in-jokes, specialized language, and philosophy.

The blogosphere can be a much more powerful norm-enforcing tool, allowing bloggers to act as a cyberposse, tracking down norm violators and branding them with digital marks of shame.

The Virtual Street Worker

So what can be done to prevent virtual bone breaking and the very real emotional damage that public shaming can cause IRL? What is appropriate for humorous mockery and parody? One thing seems clear to me: creating laws around the technology of the internet (such as what’s happening in the wake of the Megan Meier case) is not the answer, nor is a top-down authoritarian approach possible or useful. Danah Boyd had a very interesting suggestion:

The most important thing that we need are digital street workers. When I was in college, college students volunteered as street workers to help teens who were on the street find resources and help. They directed them to psychologists, doctors, and social workers. We need a program like this for the digital streets. We need college-aged young adults to troll the digital world looking out for teens who are in trouble and helping them seek help. We need online counselors who can work with minors to address their behavioral issues without forcing the minor to contend with parents or bureaucracy. We need online social workers that can connect with kids and help them understand their options.

What is certain is that adults–parents especially–need to understand these issues and work with children to help combat the issue of online bullying. This can start with something as simple as parents actually paying attention to what their kids are up to online. Teens need their privacy, but that doesn’t mean that parents shouldn’t know whether their children have invested large emotional sums in online relationships and an online persona.

Perhaps Daniel Solove will also have some insights in Chapter 4: ‘Shaming and the Digital Scarlet Letter.’ I’ll return to this topic then.

In then meantime, what are your thoughts?

Description [from Amazon]:

Teeming with chatrooms, online discussion groups, and blogs, the Internet offers previously unimagined opportunities for personal expression and communication. But there’s a dark side to the story. A trail of information fragments about us is forever preserved on the Internet, instantly available in a Google search. A permanent chronicle of our private lives—often of dubious reliability and sometimes totally false—will follow us wherever we go, accessible to friends, strangers, dates, employers, neighbors, relatives, and anyone else who cares to look. This engrossing book, brimming with amazing examples of gossip, slander, and rumor on the Internet, explores the profound implications of the online collision between free speech and privacy.

Daniel Solove, an authority on information privacy law, offers a fascinating account of how the Internet is transforming gossip, the way we shame others, and our ability to protect our own reputations. Focusing on blogs, Internet communities, cybermobs, and other current trends, he shows that, ironically, the unconstrained flow of information on the Internet may impede opportunities for self-development and freedom. Long-standing notions of privacy need review, the author contends: unless we establish a balance between privacy and free speech, we may discover that the freedom of the Internet makes us less free.

Reading schedule / links to responses below the jump…

Remember this is when I hope to post my responses only. To participate, you can read at your own pace and post your thoughts whenever you get around to it!

The idea is simple: I’ll feature two or three books at a time (pictured in the sidebar) and post a schedule for reading them chapter by chapter. As I read them, I will post a synopsis of the chapter and then everyone is invited to discuss the chapter with me in the comments. The advantage of doing this online is that you need not read the chapters on time or even in the right order—just post your commentary when you get around to it.

Please reply to this message with suggestions for interesting books to read in the future. Books should be nonfiction and should have something to do with the loose themes that erelevant addresses (electronic culture, marketing, youth, etc).

Give your eyes a break from the screen and put some paper in your hands! Of course, I guess you can use your Kindle …

Books I am or am going to feature:
Solove , Daniel J., The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet
Sun Tzu (Thomas Cleary trans.), The Art of War
Zittrain, Jonathan, The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It