Rage against the machine

Sherry Turkle, psychologist, professor and scholar of the information age and its impact on society and the self, once wrote, "We come to see ourselves differently as we catch our image in the mirror of the machine". That was back in 1999. The machine was still in its infancy. Back then, she went on to write that our concept of ourselves, our identity, is being "recast in terms of multiple windows and parallel lives".

I think that we have always had multiple windows through which to view and present ourselves and to a certain extent, we have always led parallel lives. The difference in the age of social media is that the multitude of windows in the machine that Turkle wrote about in 1999 has since grown exponentially; the number of people looking through them, nearly infinite. And, the only limit to the number of parallel lives that we can create online in 2012 is limited only by our ability to keep track of the accounts and passwords (and even then, there's an app for that).

Yes, the machine has grown significantly in the past 13 years. You would think that with such growth there would be many corners to hide in, many places to carry on our parallel lives without fear that they would ever intersect. This is not the reality, however. If anything, the virtual world has become more transparent.

Recent stories making the news (and trending on social media sites) bear out this new reality. Case in point, the miscreants who posted disparaging and thoughtless remarks on social media sites memorializing Amanda Todd, the teenage victim of cyber bullying. A group of people turned the capacity of social media to torment individuals on its head, forming virtual posses, trolling sites like Facebook and outing would-be anonymous posters.

In 2008, David Lyon wrote about our surveillance society. With the advent of social media, he rightly contends, the key purveyor of our personal information has shifted from government institutions to corporations. But the events of the past week leads me to believe that our surveillance society is shifting yet again. Oh, the machine is still chugging away, collecting and manipulating our personal information for government and corporations alike. But it appears that those who have been surveiled have begun manipulating the machine themselves. Rightly or wrongly.  

Image courtesy of Victor Habbick, freedigitalphotos.net