A junior girl at Roosevelt High School is worried: “My SAT tutor told me never to say anything stupid on e-mail because it can always be available to people. Which is a little alarming, because I’m writing every day to my friend in Toronto, and of course I’m mentioning other friends and sometimes summarizing them in ways I wouldn’t want them to see, and so I’m kind of hoping no one discovers that.” A Roosevelt freshman, already aware that the Internet is a “permanent record,” decides to commit her most private thoughts to paper: “I keep my secrets in my diary, not on my computer and not on my website.”
We have met eighteen-year-old Brad, wary of the Internet. He knows that his online life is not private. Most of the time, he manages not to think about it. But most recently, he is troubled. What bothers him most are his friends’ use of “chat logs.” Brad explains: “Anytime you type something, even without your having done anything or agreed to anything, it [the chat log] saves it to a folder.” Brad was unaware that there was such a thing until a conversation with a friend brought him up short. At the time, they were both high school juniors, and she mentioned something he had said during freshman year. She had been using chat logs all through high school. Brad says, “I was shocked that this was how she was spending her time . . . going through conversations like that.” Now, he is torn between feeling upset that he had been unknowingly “recorded” and feeling angry at himself for being surprised. “After all,” he says “I know how IM conversations work.... I think I had heard of this but forgot it. I know there’s a very good chance . . . that I know certain [people] who have chat logs turned on.”
Brad blames himself for being too free in his messaging. The idea that his sophomore year ramblings could find their way onto somebody’s Facebook page or blog or “wherever” is intolerable to him. Brad doesn’t have a very clear image of what bad things might happen, but his anxiety is real. He says that data capture is “awful.” His words could show up anywhere.
Brad says that he no longer sees online life as a place to relax and be himself “because things get recorded.... It’s just another thing you have to keep in the back of your mind, that you have to do things very carefully.” In person, if he loses his temper or is misunderstood in a conversation, he says, “I can be like, ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘Let me repeat myself’ ... or I can crack a joke and laugh it off.” Online, even if a person isn’t recording you, Facebook is. “I’ve heard plenty of stories about people leaving messages or posts on people’s walls on Facebook that, the next day, they felt bad about, because they felt it was stupid of them. It was spur-of-the-moment, they lost their head or something like that.” But there it was, representing you at your worst.
Brad acknowledges that “of course, if you say or do something stupid in person,” you can be reminded of it later, but in face-to-face communication, he sees a lot of “wiggle room” for “general human error.” Online, it is always possible that people are collecting “visual proof . . . saved written proof” of your mistake. Brad steps back from blaming either what the technology makes possible or the people who record you without permission. He says he is a “realist.” By this he means that “anyone who lives in the digital world should know that it is not permissible to lose your temper online or say anything that you would not want to be distributed.” And besides, says Brad, “there is never any reason to use online communication for spontaneous feeling.... You have no excuse for snapping online because you could have just waited for a couple minutes and not typed anything and cooled down.” Here, we see self-policing to the point of trying to achieve a precorrected self.
When Brad talks about “visual proof . . . saved written proof” of damaging exchanges, he sounds like someone hunted. I ask him about people saving his letters. He says that this does not bother him. In a letter, he explains, he thinks before he writes, and sometimes he writes a letter over several times. But to him, even though he “knew better,” Internet conversations feel tentative; you get into the habit of thinking as you write. Although everything is “composed,” he somehow gets into “an experience of being in a free zone.” Audrey, sixteen, described a similar disconnect. She
feels
that online life is a space for experimentation. But she
knows
that electronic messages are forever and that colleges and potential employers have ways of getting onto her Facebook page. What she feels and what she knows do not sync.
Brad and Audrey both experience the paradox of electronic messaging. You stare at a screen on your desk or in your hand. It is passive, and you own the frame; these promise safety and acceptance. In the cocoon of electronic messaging, we imagine the people we write to as we wish them to be; we write to that part of them that makes us feel safe. You feel in a place that is private and ephemeral. But your communications are public and forever. This disconnect between the feeling of digital communication and its reality explains why people continue to send damaging e-mails and texts, messages that document them breaking the law and cheating on their spouses. People try to force themselves to mesh their behavior with what they know rather than how they feel. But when people want to forget that they do not have privacy on the Internet, the medium colludes.
Recall seventeen-year-old Elaine, who thought that the Internet made it easier for the shy to make friends because they have fewer inhibitions when they can hide behind a screen. Elaine’s sense of this “free” space is conflicted. For example, she knows that everything she puts on a site like Facebook will always be there and belong to Facebook. But Elaine has no confidence that, once online, she will be able to remember that she is speaking to posterity. The Internet might be forever, but it takes discipline to keep this in mind. She thinks it is unrealistic to say, “What happens on the Internet, stays on the Internet.” She says that this is “just too hard.... It’s just human nature that things will get out.” She is skeptical of those who say they are able to place a wall between their offline and online lives: “Everything that is on the Internet, everyone can copy and paste, or save.... If you’re having a conversation with someone in speech, and it’s not being tape-recorded, you can change your opinion, but on the Internet it’s not like that. On the Internet it’s almost as if everything you say were being tape-recorded. You can’t say, ‘I changed my mind.’ You can, but at the same time it’s already there.”
There is truth in a view of the Internet as a place for experimentation and self-expression. Yet, from Elaine’s point of view, what she is free to do is to say things that will “be remembered forever.” Common sense prevails: “free” combined with “forever” doesn’t seem workable. Elaine says, “I feel that my childhood has been stolen by the Internet. I shouldn’t have to be thinking about these things.” Dawn tried to “scrub” her Facebook page when she got into college. “I wanted a fresh start,” she says. But she could only delete so much. Her friends had pictures of her on their pages and messages from her on their walls. All of these would remain. She says, “It’s like somebody is about to find a horrible secret that I didn’t know I left someplace.”
Here, as in Brad’s unforgiving self-criticism (“I should have known ... you have no excuse . . . ”), one sees a new regime of self-surveillance at work. As toddlers, these children learned how to type online, and then they discovered it was forever. We see a first generation going through adolescence knowing that their every misstep, all the awkward gestures of their youth, are being frozen in a computer’s memory. Some put this out of mind, but some cannot, do not—and I think, should not.
It has taken a generation for people to begin to understand that on the Internet, the words “delete” and “erase” are metaphorical: files, photographs, mail, and search histories are only removed from your sight.
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The Internet never forgets. The magnitude of this is hard to believe because one’s first instinct is to find it unbelievable. Some teenagers deny what is happening; some respond by finding it “unfair” that they will, like turtles, be carrying themselves on their backs all their lives. Corbin, a senior at Hadley, comments on the idea that nothing on the Net will ever go way. He says, “All the things I’ve written on Facebook will always be around. So you can never escape what you did.”
With the persistence of data, there is, too, the persistence of people. If you friend someone as a ten-year-old, it takes positive action to unfriend that person. In principle, everyone wants to stay in touch with the people they grew up with, but social networking makes the idea of “people from one’s past” close to an anachronism. Corbin reaches for a way to express his discomfort. He says, “For the first time, people will stay your friends. It makes it harder to let go of your life and move on.” Sanjay, sixteen, who wonders if he will be “writing on my friends’ walls when I’m a grown-up,” sums up his misgivings: “For the first time people can stay in touch with people all of their lives. But it used to be good that people could leave their high school friends behind and take on new identities.”
This is the anxiety of always. A decade ago I argued that the fluidity, flexibility, and multiplicity of our lives on the screen encouraged the kind of self that Robert Jay Lifton called “protean.”
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I still think it is a useful metaphor. But the protean self is challenged by the persistence of people and data. The sense of being protean is sustained by an illusion with an uncertain future. The experience of being at one’s computer or cell phone feels so private that we easily forget our true circumstance: with every connection we leave an electronic trace.
Similarly, I have argued that the Internet provided spaces for adolescents to experiment with identity relatively free of consequences, as Erik Erikson argued they must have. The persistence of data and people undermines this possibility as well. I talk to teenagers who send and receive six to eight thousand texts a month, spend hours a day on Facebook, and interleave instant messaging and Google searches—all activities that leave a trace. The idea of the moratorium does not easily mesh with a life that generates its own electronic shadow.
Peter Pan, who could not see his shadow, was the boy who never grew up. Most of us are like him. Over time (and I say this with much anxiety), living with an electronic shadow begins to feel so natural that the shadow seems to disappear—that is, until a moment of crisis: a lawsuit, a scandal, an investigation. Then, we are caught short, turn around, and see that we have been the instruments of our own surveillance. But most of the time, we behave as if the shadow were not there rather than simply invisible. Indeed, most of the adolescents who worry with me about the persistence of online data try to put it out of their minds. The need for a moratorium space is so compelling that if they must, they are willing to find it in a fiction. This is an understandable and unstable resolution. The idea that you leave a trace because you make a call, send a text, or leave a Facebook message is on some level intolerable. And so, people simply behave as though it were not happening.
Adults, too, live the fiction. Some behave as though e-mail were private, although they know it is not. Others say they never have significant business or personal conversations electronically. They insist that for anything important, they speak on a secure landline. But then, as we talk, they usually admit to the times that they haven’t followed their own rules. Most often, there is a shamefaced admission of an indiscretion on e-mail.
Some say this issue is a nonissue; they point out that privacy is a historically new idea. This is true. But although historically new, privacy has well served our modern notions of intimacy and democracy. Without privacy, the borders of intimacy blur. And, of course, when all information is collected, everyone can be turned into an informer.
PRIVACY HAS A POLITICS
It has become commonplace to talk about all the good the Web has done for politics. We have new sources of information, such as news of political events from all over the world that comes to us via photographs and videos taken by the cameras on cell phones. There is organizing and fund-raising; ever since the 2004 primary run of Howard Dean, online connections have been used as a first step in bringing people together physically. The Barack Obama campaign transformed the Dean-era idea of the “meet up” into a tool for bringing supporters out of the virtual and into each other’s homes or onto the streets. We diminish none of these very positive developments if we attend to the troubling realities of the Internet when it comes to questions of privacy. Beyond passivity and resignation, there is a chilling effect on political speech.
When they talk about the Internet, young people make a disturbing distinction between embarrassing behavior that will be forgiven and political behavior that might get you into trouble. For high school and college students, stalking and anything else they do
to each other
fall into the first category. Code such antics as embarrassing. They believe that you can apologize for embarrassing behavior and then move on. Celebrity culture, after all, is all about transgression and rehabilitation. (These young people’s comfort with “bullying” their peers is part of this pattern—something for which they believe they will be forgiven.) But you can’t “take back” political behavior, like signing a petition or being at a demonstration. One eighteen-year-old puts it this way: “It [the Internet] definitely makes you think about going to a protest or something. There would be so many cameras. You can’t tell where the pictures could show up.”
Privacy has a politics. For many, the idea “we’re all being observed all the time anyway, so who needs privacy?” has become a commonplace. But this state of mind has a cost. At a Webby Awards ceremony, an event to recognize the best and most influential websites, I was reminded of just how costly it is. The year I attended the Webbies, the ceremonies took place just as a government wiretapping scandal dominated the press. When the question of illegal eavesdropping arose, a common reaction among the gathered “Weberati” was to turn the issue into a nonissue. There was much talk about “all information being good information,” “information wanting to be free,” and “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” At a pre-awards cocktail party, one Web luminary spoke to me with animation about the wiretapping controversy. To my surprise, he cited Michel Foucault on the panopticon to explain why he was not worried about privacy on the Internet.