Hannah succumbed to this mentality and her time on Facebook got out of control. She explains how one thing led to another: “You’re online. Someone asks you something. You feel like they want to know. It makes you feel good, so you keep on typing.... It’s like being flattered for hours. But who are they really?” Now, increasingly anxious about that question, even her friendship with Ian seems tenuous. She has started to feel that by investing in Ian, she is becoming more isolated from what she calls “everyday in-person” connections. There are, she observes, “just so many hours in a day.” In fact, when I meet her, Hannah is taking a break from the IRC channel. But she misses Ian and does not think it will last long.
HIDE AND STALK
Julia is afraid to “friend” her father on MySpace because she thinks she would not be able to resist the temptation to stalk him. Stalking is a guilty pleasure and a source of anxiety, but Chris, nineteen, a senior at Hadley, explains how it becomes routine. Every phone has a camera, and his friends take photographs all the time. They post their photos on Facebook and label them. This usually includes “tagging” each photograph with the names of all of the people in it. There are a lot of “tagged” photographs of Chris online, “pictures at parties, in the locker room, when I’m messing around with my friends.” On Facebook, one can search for all the pictures of any given person. This is often where stalking begins. Chris is handsome and an accomplished athlete. He knows that a lot of girls look at his pictures. “The stalking is a little flattering, but it also makes me feel creeped out.... Some of the pictures creep me out, but everybody has all of these kinds of pictures online.” And he is not in a position to cast the first stone. For he, too, stalks girls on Facebook who interest him: “I find myself choosing some girl I like and following the trail of her tagged pictures. You can see who she hangs with. Is she popular? Is there a chance she has a boyfriend? I start to do it in a sort of random way, and then, all of a sudden, a couple hours have passed. I’m stalking.”
Chris does not judge himself harshly. The public display of locker room photos is “awful” but part of being popular. Also, having people look at you puts you in contact with them. Even when you are alone, you know that people are seeking you out. Teenagers seem to feel that things should be different but are reconciled to a new kind of life: the life they know celebrities live. So, you get used to the idea that if you are drunk or in erotic disarray—things that are likely to happen at some point during high school—someone will take a picture of you, probably by using the camera in their phone. And once on that person’s phone, the image will find its way to the Internet, where you will lose control of its further travels.
So, stalking is a transgression that does not transgress. A seventeen-year-old junior at the Fillmore School describes it as “the worst. Normal, but still creepy.” Normal because “it’s not against the rules to look at people’s wall-to-wall conversations [on Facebook].” Creepy because “it’s like listening to a conversation that you are not in, and after stalking I feel like I need to take a shower.” Just starting college, Dawn, eighteen, says she is “obsessed” with the “interesting people” who are her new classmates: “I spend all night reading people’s walls. I track their parties. I check out their girlfriends.” She, too, says, “My time on Facebook makes me feel dirty.” So stalking may not be breaking any rules, but it has given young people a way to invade each other’s privacy that can make them feel like spies and pornographers.
As teenagers turn stalking into part of their lives, they become resigned to incursions into their privacy. Julia says that at Branscomb “you get into trouble if there are MySpace pictures of you at a party where there is beer.” She and her friends believe that school officials and the police look at students’ MySpace accounts. Julia’s response is to police herself and watch over her friends. “I’m, like, always telling them, ‘Don’t put that picture up there. You’ll get into trouble.’” One Branscomb senior says that he has “a regular blog and a secret blog. On my secret blog I have a fake name,” but later in our conversation he wonders whether his secret blog can be traced to him through the IP address that tags his computer. He hadn’t thought of this before our conversation. He says that thinking about it makes him feel “hopeless.”
At Roosevelt High School, sixteen-year-old Angela had her MySpace page “hacked.” She explains, “‘Hacked’ is when people get on your page and change everything. Yeah, that happened to me once. I don’t know who did it. But it happened. [voice gets quiet] They changed the whole layout. And they made it as though I was a lesbian. I had to go and erase everything. A lot of people asked me, ‘Oh, are you a lesbian now?’ I had to explain to everyone, ‘No, I got hacked.’ It took me a long time to explain. And they’d say, ‘Oh, that sucks.’”
When people tamper with your physical mail, they have committed a crime. When people hack your social-networking account,
you
have explaining to do. When Angela first blurted out her story, it was clear that the incident had frightened her. Then, she backtracked and minimized what had happened, saying, “It doesn’t really happen every day.” This is the defense of those who feel they have no options. Angela is not going to give up MySpace. Anger will serve no purpose. So, instead, she reinterprets what happened to her. She had been inconvenienced. “I was mad because now I had to do everything all over again, but I didn’t really care that they did it. It doesn’t really happen every day. . . . It doesn’t really happen every day.”
I hear a similar kind of backpedaling in a discussion of online life at the Silver Academy. When I ask a group of sophomores, “Are any of you worried about your online privacy?” they call out, “Yeah, yes, yeah.” Carla and Penny rush to tell their story. They are so excited that they begin to speak together. Then they settle down, and Carla takes over: “I went out to the store with my mother, and I left my phone at home, and Penny here texted me. And I didn’t have my phone, but my brother was right near it, and it was buzzing. So my brother decides to text her back as me. And she said something, and my brother was being very rude. And I had to call her up later and tell her that it was my brother texting, not me.” At first, the two girls seem to want everyone to know that this is a very upsetting story. But when the group listens with little visible emotion—everyone there has heard of a similar story—the girls retreat. Penny says that Carla’s brother was not artful in his impersonation, so maybe she would have figured it out. Carla, now isolated in her anger, backs down. “Yeah, I guess so.”
The media has tended to portray today’s young adults as a generation that no longer cares about privacy. I have found something else, something equally disquieting. High school and college students don’t really understand the rules. Are they being watched? Who is watching? Do you have to do something to provoke surveillance, or is it routine? Is surveillance legal? They don’t really understand the terms of service for Facebook or Gmail, the mail service that Google provides. They don’t know what protections they are “entitled” to. They don’t know what objections are reasonable or possible. If someone impersonates you by getting access to your cell phone, should that behavior be treated as illegal or as a prank? In teenagers’ experience, their elders—the generation that gave them this technology—don’t have ready answers to such questions.
So Julia, despite worrying that school authorities and the police look over students’ online profiles, is quick to admit that she is not really sure that this is the case. But then she adds that that no matter what the truth might be, there is nothing she can do about it. One seventeen-year-old, “scrubbing” her Facebook account under the orders of her high school guidance counselor (concerned about compromising photographs that should be removed before the college-admissions process), is convinced that anyone with enough time and money can find a way onto her Facebook page without her permission. “People keep talking about how colleges look at it and employers too. I guess they just have people signing on, pretending to be friends. I don’t really know how it works.”
There is an upside to vagueness. What you don’t know won’t make you angry. Julia says, “Facebook and MySpace are my life.” If she learned something too upsetting about what, say, Facebook can do with her information, she would have to justify staying on the site. But Julia admits that whatever she finds out, even if her worst fears of surveillance by high school administrators and local police were true, she would not take action. She cannot imagine her life without Facebook.
Julia ends up a portrait of insecurity and passivity. She wants to hide from the details. She would rather just be careful about what she does than learn too much about who is actually watching. “I put it out of my mind,” she says. She tells me that she, personally, feels safe because “I’m kind of boring.” That is, it makes no difference if she is watched because there is nothing much to see. A sixteen-year-old girl shrugs off Facebook’s privacy policy in similar terms: “Who would care about me and my little life?” Another sixteen-year-old, a boy, says that when he wants to have a private conversation he knows that he has to find a pay phone—“the old fashioned kind” that takes coins.These are disturbing mantras.
Some teenagers say that their privacy concerns are not as bad as they might seem because, in the future, everyone running for office, everyone about to get a judicial appointment or an important corporate job, will have an accessible Internet past with significant indiscretions.
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In this narrative, implacable digital memory will not be punishing but will create a more tolerant society. Others come up with a generational argument: “Facebook is owned by young people.” This idea confuses investors, owners, managers, inventors, spokespeople, and shareholders. It is innocent of any understanding of how corporations work or are governed. But it is not a surprising response. If your life is on Facebook or MySpace or Google, you want to feel that these companies are controlled by good people. Good people are defined as those who share what you feel is your most salient characteristic. For the young, that characteristic is youth.
In fact, from the very beginning, Facebook has been in something of a tug-of-war with its users about how much control it has over their data. The pattern, predictably, is that Facebook declares ownership of all of it and tries to put it to commercial use. Then, there is resistance and Facebook retreats. This is followed by another advance, usually with subtler contours. One sixteen-year-old says, and her comment is typical, “Oh, they [Facebook] keep changing the policy all the time. You can try to change their policy, but usually they just put the policy in fine print.” She herself doesn’t read the fine print. She assumes that in the end, Facebook will take what it wants. “You can try to get Facebook to change things. Maybe after years they will. Maybe they won’t. This is just the way it is.” Google’s advances and retreats in this arena show a similar pattern.
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As long as Facebook and Google are seen as necessities, if they demand information, young people know they will supply it. They don’t know what else to do.
Some Internet entrepreneurs have made the case that there is not much to do.
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As early as 1999, Scott McNealy, a cofounder of Sun Microsystems, said, “You have zero privacy anyway; get over it.”
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A decade later, Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, added a new spin: “If you have something you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” Most recently he is on record predicting that in the near future all young people will be automatically entitled to change their names to escape their online pasts.
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PRIVACY AND THE ANXIETIES OF ALWAYS
In the early 1990s, I began studying people experimenting with identity on the Internet. They created avatars and Web pages. They played with romance and revenge. In those early days, it was commonplace for Web sites and virtual locales to disappear because the enthusiasts who ran them lost interest, lost access to a server, or invented something new. When this happened, people migrated to other online places. These migrations could mean “losing” all the work you had put into an avatar and a virtual community. The Internet seemed transient.
The Facebook generation goes online with different expectations. They expect Facebook or its successor company to be there forever. This expectation is incentive to “behave.” Of course, people slip up and repent at leisure. Gloria, eighteen, contemplates the things she has posted on Facebook and says, “It’s like the Internet could blackmail me.” She has grown more careful. She cannot imagine doing something in public that will not end up on Facebook. Any time she goes out to a dance or a party or a coffee shop, friends are taking pictures and posting them. She does not want to misbehave in a way that would cause Facebook to want her off the system.
Hester, eighteen, a college freshman, says that she has started to worry about all the things she has put on the Internet that it is “too late to take away.” She says, “That’s the one bad thing [about online life]. On a typewriter, you can take the paper out and shred it. But if it’s online, it’s online. People can copy and paste it; people can e-mail it to each other; people can print it.... You need to be careful what you write on the Internet because most of the things . . . if you put it on the Internet, that’s it. A lot of people . . . they may or may not have access to it, but still, it’s there.” This is life in the world of cut and paste. Worse, this is life in the world of cut, edit, and paste. A senior at the Hadley School reviews what can happen to an online conversation: “People can save it, and you don’t know they’re saving it. Or people can copy and paste it and send it to someone else. You think it is private but its not.... And all they have to do is rewrite anything they want. They can send it to a friend, making a person look a lot worse. Nothing you say will necessarily stay the way you said it.”