Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [50]
Even services with other primary objectives observe such social differentiation these days. The Flickr photo-sharing service, for example, recognizes a gradient of affinity, inscribing distinctions between a user's "family," "friends," "contacts," and everyone else—with the result that there's plenty of room for people who know me on Flickr to wonder why (and potentially be hurt by the fact that) I consider them a "contact" and not a "friend."
What if every fact about which we generally try to dissemble, in our crafting of a mask to show the world, was instead made readily and transparently available? I'm not just talking about obvious privacy issues—histories of various sorts of irresponsibility, or of unpopular political, religious, or sexual predilections—but about subtler and seemingly harmless things as well: who you've chosen to befriend in your life, say, or what kinds of intimacy you choose to share with them, but not others.
This is exactly what is implied by a global information processing system with inputs and outputs scattered all over the place. With everyware, all that information about you or me going into the network implies that it comes out again somewhere else—a "somewhere" that is difficult or impossible to specify ahead of time—and this has real consequences for how we go about constructing a social self. When these private and unspoken arrangements are drawn out into the open, are made public and explicit, embarrassment, discomfort, even resentment can follow for all parties involved.
These are events that Gary T. Marx, the MIT professor emeritus of sociology whose theories of technology and social control we discussed in Thesis 30, refers to as border crossings: irruptions of information in an unexpected (and generally problematic) context. Marx identifies several distinct types of crossing—natural, social, spatial/temporal, and ephemeral—but they all share a common nature: in each case, something happens to violate "the expectation by people that parts of their lives can exist in isolation from other parts." you see something compromising through a hole in your neighbor's fence, for example, or a mother sneaks into her daughter's room and reads her "secret" diary.
The Web is a generator par excellence of such crossings, from the ludicrous to the terrifying. We've all seen a momentary slip of the tongue recorded on high-fidelity video and uploaded for all the world to see (and mock). There's an entire genre of humor revolving around the sundry Jedi Knight fantasies and wardrobe malfunctions that shall now live for all time, mirrored on dozens or hundreds of servers around the globe. And much of the annoyance of spam, for many of us, is the appearance of sexually explicit language and/or imagery in times and places we've devoted to other activities.
But this is all a foretaste of what we can see coming. Where everyware is concerned, we can no longer expect anything to exist in isolation from anything else. It comprises a "global mnemotechnical system," in the words of French philosopher Bernard Stiegler—a mesh of computational awareness, operating in a great many places and on a great many channels, fused to techniques that permit the relational or semantic cross-referencing of the facts thus garnered, and an almost limitless variety of modes and opportunities for output. It brings along with it the certainty that if a fact once enters the grid—any fact, of any sort, from your Aunt Helga's blood pressure at noon last Sunday to the way you currently feel about your most recent ex-boyfriend—it will acquire a strange kind of