For Computers and Writing (Medium is the Massage)

Privacy and the Internet

I got rather tickled when I was reading McLuhan's book. For some reason, I was thinking he was talking about the effect the internet has on us all. When I got to the part about television it threw me for a minute. I had to go back and check the date this book was written. It is rather eerie how relevant his information is today.

A couple of things immediately jumped out at me. The idea that we are losing privacy in gaining technology is something that I keep seeing over and over in my news feeds. When it comes to the real life and death examples of the media in the lives of celebrities (i.e. Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston) the "tyrannical womb-to-tomb surveillance [is] causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the community's need to know" (12). While many people won't have their lives scrutinized by the entire world, they can be subjected to it on a smaller scale once someone updates their facebook status. It seems that even with privacy settings there still is very little privacy online. As McLuhan writes, "the older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions--the patterns of mechanistic technologies--are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval by the electrically computerized dossier bank" (12).

This reminded me of an article I saw on a British couple that were detained by DHS for making terrorist threats on twitter. You can read about it here. I think it is rather creepy to know that everything you type is being watched, even if it is supposed to be in the country's best interest. This could explain why facebook freezes when I am talking about a controversial subject.

The readings also reminded me about another article I read where a young girl complained about her parents on facebook. Not that this is anything out of the ordinary, especially after reading McLuhan's ideas about youth. What makes it interesting is the way that the girl was caught and the resulting aftermath. The girl tried to control her privacy by using the settings to block out her parents, but forgot to block the dog. When the parents logged in to the dog's facebook page they saw the girl's post (which means she didn't take into account her global family/neighborhood had expanded to include the dog). Apparently, the father thought a suitable punishment would be to shoot the computer, and of course it made the news. The article says that the father decided to respond via facebook to the media (which is where the whole problem started) and not do interviews. To me, it illustrates McLuhan's point about propaganda ending where dialogue begins, and how you must "talk to the media, not the programmer" (142). Check out the article here.

While I'm not sure how McLuhan has addressed this same topic today. It isn't the same as once having television characters beamed into your living room. Today friends, family, strangers, and the government can downright intrude into what you think is your own personal space--even with privacy settings. People can enter your thoughts, judge them, and then leave comments to tell you how genius or insane they believe you are. I think that it is important to realize how much more relevant this information is today.