Did You Know You Were Under Surveillance?
“What’s on your mind?” —Facebook
Whenever I open the Facebook app (which I do with far greater frequency than I would like to admit), what’s typically on my mind is 1) what I wish to post and 2) who will see it and how will they respond? What is typically not on my mind (although it should be with far greater frequency) is 1) why am I back again, and 2) what is Facebook doing with my presence here, again?
I long ago, early in the development of Facebook, answered the question of whether I should be on social media in the affirmative. I did so because it’s where people are (or where people were going) and as a pastor I felt it important to be present where people are. This was further validated by many interventions where a listening presence was invaluable in the life of parishioners. It meant something to them for me to be there and to have seen them.
I do not wish to examine all the techno-pessimist doubts some have about the move to social media, or the differences between the real and the digital. I’m not convinced there are. Differences, that is. And the optimism or pessimism we apply to new media should equally be applied to all mediations.
But I do believe there is one particular way presence in social media is quite different from other kinds of mediation, and this is at the level of surveillance.
Prior to e-mail, prior to social media, I used to write more paper letters. A paper letter was a relatively private affair. You could write the letter somewhere, say out in the tractor on breaks between loads of grain. Then seal that letter in an envelope, place it in the mail, and remain relatively certain the only reader of the letter would be the recipient at the other end. They then could respond in kind, and the letters between you would only become part of broader public consumption if you saved the letters and your children read them out of a box when you died, or you were a public intellectual and the letters were collected into published works.
Even in this instance, during the writing of the letters, during the moments of correspondence, your authorship, your readership, was private, just yours, and both reader and writer composed or read under that basic (mostly accurate) assumption.
Now, take e-mail or social media. There is far greater ease by which the administrators of servers can peer into e-mails coming and going in workplaces. Although this could have been done previously (presumably, a mail carrier could use steam to unseal a letter, read it, then reseal it), now the surveillance of e-mails is kept to a minimum only by way of the volume of correspondence. There are just so many letters, who can monitor them all?
But social media is a whole other story. When you sign on to social media platforms, most of them require you sign user agreements that gives them full access to your content, and opportunity to analyze that content. And not just analyze what you post, but also analyze what you click, or even pause to view. You’ve likely noticed that if you simply pause to look more closely at the post from an advertiser, that advertiser begins to appear more regularly in your feed. And almost all of us have had the experience of having content appear in our news feed after we spoke about (but never typed) a product or topic.
All social media is watching and listening and tailoring the content you see in order to sell you things. Of course they are, It’s how they make a profit, and it’s how they provide you with “free” social media.
But why does this matter? Well, on one level, as long as you are comfortable living with and adapting to late-stage capitalism, perhaps you don’t mind that much. It’s simply what you accommodate in order to enjoy the accommodations of new and often pleasant technologies. The affordances and pleasures of new media are many.
But the methods of surveillance introduced by new media are invisibly and not so invisibly shaping you, and shaping your media self-presentation. At the very least, the ways this new surveillance is impacting you ride below the level of awareness. Algorithms are at work we’re not privy to. Psychological marketing strategies are at play that make you want to return again and again, and these psychological manipulations (unlike the possible emotional massaging you can experience from a letter writer, where at least you know who is writing) are designed by hidden marketing teams, in all likelihood large marketing teams with years of experience and copyrighted, proven methods for modulating your reactions and interactions.
I’m thinking in this context of that great letter writer of antiquity, Paul the Apostle. Paul comes across in his letters in a remarkable fashion, so much so that we feel we know the man, even if sometimes we also dislike him. He’s nothing if not strong in his approach.
Sometimes in his letters he reflects on letter-writing itself as a practice. In his second letter to the Corinthians, he writes, “You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everyone. You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.
Such confidence we have through Christ before God. Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God. He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant—not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.”
I wonder: to what degree does the surveillance social media conducts of our interactions actually influence or shape how we impact our friends and family on social media. We know from experience that observers change what they observe. The Norwegian film Kitchen Stories illustrated this all too well, and the thought experiment of Schrodinger’s cat teaches us that observation can even change or affect reality itself (not to mention Wigner’s friend test, which ups the ante by observing the observer as well).
So what of surveillance? Are we a different kind of letter altogether if our letters are surveilled? Would Paul have to modify his letter to the Corinthians so it read, “You yourselves and those monitoring this correspondence are our letter?”
If we take Paul’s letter as an example, perhaps we do have a parallel with greater relevance than we might first think. If Paul is writing these letters from prison, there is some likelihood his letters would first have had to cross the desk of a guard or officer responsible for checking for secret messages, etc. Although we get less indication of this in Paul’s letters, it certainly appears to be the case in the Revelation of John, where the author even makes use of codes and other visuals that would be understood only by reading communities “in the know.”
But there is a significant difference between writing to an audience while knowing or being aware your jailer might read it, and writing to an audience when you are repeatedly duped into forgetting the letters are being read. “What’s on your mind?” Facebook asks? Mostly what isn’t on our collective minds is that the first reader of any of our posts is Facebook itself, and the corporations with which it contracts.
What remains unclear to me is which mode has a greater dampening effect on our communication. Are we more likely to have our communication subtly modified because we have sublimated our awareness of being surveilled? Or are we more likely to modify our communication if we remain aware of social media surveillance? And which of these kinds of awarenesses better serves the larger goals we have for the use of social media? Which is, in the end, less intrusive?
There’s even the possibility that being surveilled in this way contributes to the social good. Clearly, billions of users can’t be wrong, right? I guess a lot depends upon how much we trust billions of users to jump onboard because they love the utility, accessibility, and ubiquity of a platform like Facebook, or whether they are there because Facebook the company, more successfully than any other social media platform, has marketed themselves and made the planet co-dependent on them.
Finally, an end-note about Twitter, because I know you’ve been asking yourself when I would get around to discussing it. Twitter is an unusual social media entity in that the value of Twitter is at much connected how much influence Twitter has on other media platforms as anything else. As a platform, it’s just not that big. As an influencer (just think of all the tweets you’ve seen while watching television news or screen-shotted for Facebook) it is outsized.
I think Elon Musk’s focus on reclaiming Twitter as a space for freedom of speech is a significant miscalculation of how “freedom” of speech functions today. It may be the case that in the short term liars and manipulators like Tucker Carlson will return to the platform now that Musk owns it. But the average user on Twitter is going to be much more influenced by patterns of surveillance on the platform (or any other) than by the policies set by a billionaire owner.
This is why, when I talked about Twitter’s acquisition recently with my oldest son, he was simply nonplussed by Musk’s move. He perceives Twitter as a rather toxic space and most of his peers are not interested in that platform. They are more likely to communicate in spaces that offer either the reality of, or at least the illusion of, smaller community and less surveillance, chief among them Snapchat.
The real growth I believe will be in these spaces (like Telegram, etc.) that ensure certain amounts of privacy in communication. Musk may have purchased the world’s largest megaphone, but I don’t think it will ever be much of a revenue producing one, and it will age out very quickly, and will beg the question if a megaphone can really be loud if no one is around to hear it.