I would like to thank Dan Filler for inviting me to join the Faculty Lounge this month. I used to blog at "Displacement of Concepts," but found that trying to teach, conduct traditional scholarly research, and perform service to the school and the community precluded maintaining a blog on my own. The current iteration of that site is mainly a placeholder. I simply did not have enough time to articulate interesting things. So I'm very happy that Dan asked me to join the Lounge for the month of August, and I'm looking forward to contributing to the conversation.
On a related note (though the relation may take awhile to get to), back in 2008 I wrote a piece entitled, "Growing Up Digital, Control and the Pieces of a Digital Life" (PDF), which appeared as a chapter in the book, "Digital Youth, Innovation and the Unexpected." I argued that the digital media of today change things qualitatively from the past in terms of the chances that something stupid you do will be caught in a photo, on an audio tape, or in a video. If that happens, the potential for embarrassment is high, just as it always has been. But what differs today, especially for young people, is that these gaffs, exposures, and embarrassing moments may follow them through life. Forever (or at least as long as they live). I refer to this as "pernicious persistence."
Put another way, it would be difficult for someone to find a photograph of me from when I was a child, let alone an embarrassing one. They are in boxes in my closet, or in my dad's basement. To find one would be a time intensive task, without promise of success. If someone had found such a photo twenty years ago, when I was in my twenties, they would have been able to show it to their friends, and that would likely have been it.
For my children, things are not likely to be so straight forward. They will upload their photos to the web, where Google (or its then incarnation) will catalog them, and the Internet Archive will make a lasting copy. When my daughter turns 25 and runs for Mayor, someone might quite easily find a video of her in a fight with another girl at school, a video shot by an observer, uploaded, tagged, and posted for the world to see. The video might even become an issue in the campaign. Did she fight dirty? Did she pull hair? Did she curse while fighting? Did she win?
Digital age technologies may prevent us, in the future, from being able to escape our childhood (or our young adulthood, or even our adulthood). Stupid things we do may become associated with us. For life.
One rejoinder to this pessimistic story is that lots of digital "stuff" goes by the wayside daily. We're on the verge of the "digital dark ages" and exabytes of data are being lost. Hard drives crash, and data on them is lost, as well. Tags that mean something today may have different and unrelated meanings in the future. All of these are possible, but the potential for this persistence of digital media is something we should all be thinking about. Or so goes my argument . . .
To bring this back around to my invitation to join the Faculty Lounge this month, I thought about my "blogging career", which started when I was at Yale in 2002. At that time I blogged with a group of interesting people at LawMeme. LawMeme is no longer online (you can get to old LawMeme posts by searching Google, but the site itself is no longer fully functional). Then I blogged at Displacement of Concepts. The original site is still on Blogspot, but we moved servers after about half a year, and the new server was taken offline after I left the University of East Anglia. I think I was given a zipped archive, but I don't have anywhere to put it. I picked Displacements up last year for a little while, but as I noted above, don't have time to keep it going on my own. Will I keep it up on my personal site? I'm not sure, as I don't think the content really warrants the space on my tiny server. The lesson? Lots of what I "did" in blogging is gone or going.
What this all says to me is that maybe things are not as persistent as I thought. Maybe YouTube will go out of business, and the videos that people have uploaded will be removed from the public sphere. If that's the case, then I'm on about nothing and can move on to worrying about something important (like whether cloud computing is really going to change things for the worse). But if I'm right, it is something we should think about further. My plan is to work the ultimate conclusion from my "Growing Up Digital" chapter -- that maybe kids should have rights to their images in photos and videos that trump those of the copyright holder and others as to distribution -- into a legislative proposal later this year ("What about the First Amendment??!!!!" I know, I know, give me some time, I'm working on it).
Should I take the time to try to find a Constitutionally acceptable way to implement such a right, or am I really just tilting at windmills? I'm interested in hearing your thoughts and comments.
While this is perhaps most acute for children, it also becomes an issue in many other contexts where traditionally we have had "social forgetfulness" allowing individuals to reinvent themselves. Blanchette and Johnson have a very interesting piece on this issue, available here:
http://ssrn.com/abstract=140048
(Direct link to pdf here - http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/blanchette/papers/is.pdf)
Posted by: TJ McIntyre | August 06, 2009 at 06:01 AM