For a high school history project on the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1937, my classmates and I uploaded three videos we had created to YouTube. Though heart-wrenching, the series garnered thousands of views in its first months alone. A while later, however, I logged in to find that several videos had been administratively removed, with no explanation other than a form notice stating I had violated the user agreement.
Frustrated online searches led me to a forum discussion on YouTube censorship. Besides showcasing examples that demonstrated, at best, a sporadic enforcement of the site's policy, one member pointed out the overlooked truth that YouTube's status as a private company offering complimentary services affords their right to control users and content. This lead me to ask the following question: If censorship in Web 2.0 mediums is swift, silent, and entirely legal, are they appropriate habitats for the incubation of one's identity and free, diverse discussion?
The answer is obvious to me, but for many users of the world's fastest-growing websites, the reality may be less apparent. Concerns over online rights have risen drastically in recent years, with prominent “techies” publicly deleting their social media accounts. And yet, these well-justified reactions are considered statistically insignificant.
Steps away from basic democratic principles and individual privacy, however, may be the cumulative effects of an online culture that emphasizes the “mass” over the depth and relevance of the “media,” and exalts crowd views while denouncing critics as Luddites. In his 2010 release, You Are Not a Gadget, virtual-reality pioneer Jaron Lanier criticizes the internet's current direction as one that stifles innovation, elevates convenience over freedom, and shuns intellectual diversity. Particularly, Lanier is wary of the concept of “lock-in,” the idea that once an element of the online experience becomes the expected norm—for better or for worse—it becomes permanent. Lock-in, Lanier warns, “removes design options based on what is easiest to program, what is politically feasible, what is fashionable, or what is created by chance.”
Modern culture has evolved to treat online presences no longer as additions to identities, but as the identities themselves. Such thinking renders one's reputation, social status, and ability to speak freely in online communities into the hands of invisible puppetmasters—and millions of unknown strangers. In a January 2010 interview, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressed his company's concurrence with the online masses: “We view it as our role... to reflect what the current social norms are.”
Disillusioned by Facebook's continued disrespect for the privacy of its users, just weeks ago I followed links to the page where I could deactivate my account. Pictures of friends, who I know well enough in person, immediately appeared, along with captions saying they'd me miss me. As if this wasn't offensive enough, my father was among them. Surely a man with whom I share daily conversation won't care about the disappearance of my online profile, but this is how major establishments in our technology-obsessed culture have begun to assert a monopoly on human interaction.
While Web 2.0—and soon, Web 3.0 and onward—technologies revolutionize the way our society communicates and thinks, they also introduce significant threats to the basic freedoms of expression, information, and association. The intricacies of our relationships become more frequently influenced by algorithms, and our pasts reduced to lists of electronic checkpoints. Perhaps it is time to reconsider just who desires such control over our identities and interactions with others—and what they have the power to do once we surrender it.
This post is an entry in the blog contest responding to the new book, New Threats to Freedom, edited by Adam Bellow. The contest is open to all and further information can be found here.
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