Technoculture, Publicity, and Digital Privacy in the Information Age

Introduction: Technoculture and Its Ideology

Jodi Dean makes the claim that publicity represents the ideology of technoculture. Analyzing this idea requires considering the meaning of publicity and the nature of technoculture, as well as how the two fit together. Technoculture arguably identifies the cultural system we live in today — a system marked by the widespread use of technology. More than this, we can say that the technology used has become pervasive and links business, entertainment, and social life in an increasingly seamless way, as people accept the potential of technology while often failing to see how their lives and interactions are being changed by it. Some of the concerns raised about this by critics sound much like whistling in the wind. The growth and dissemination of technology is now unstoppable, and the direction taken by the culture evolves automatically based on the technological choices made by consumers.

Technoculture embraces both old and new technology and is based on a view of the supremacy of technology as a force and a conduit for communication. Publicity as the ideology of technoculture shows that more and more communication involves a form of self-advertising for companies, organizations, movements, and individuals alike.

Dean (2002) views technoculture as being trapped in what she calls "a weird matrix," noting that "at just that moment when everything seems fully public, the media pulses with invocations of the secret" (p. 1). Dean notes how the media uses secrets as demonstrations of vulnerability and emphasizes security as a way of gathering and protecting secrets. A second and seemingly opposing aspect of technoculture is a seeming openness that is also characterized as more democratic than other actions in the public forum and that involves the exposure of the intimate:

Technoculture and Publicity

"That is to say, technoculture materializes aspirations long associated with the public sphere. Indeed, it sometimes seems a machinery produced by the very ideals inspiring democracy. Advances in computer-mediated interaction provide ever-greater numbers of people with access to information. No longer a privilege of the elite, information is available to anyone with a computer. Similarly, more people have opportunities to register their thoughts and opinions on political topics than ever before. Chat rooms, cybersalons, and e-zines are just some of the new electronic spaces in which people can participate as equals in processes of collective will formation" (Dean 2002, p. 2).

Some theorists see the new technology as reflecting the ideal of the public sphere in that it offers universal access, uncoerced communication, freedom of expression, participation outside of traditional political institutions, and contributes to the creation of public opinion by means of public discussion. The fuel in the system is publicity, which links together the ideals of openness, inclusivity, visibility, equality, accessibility, and rationality (Dean 2002, p. 2). The new technology, like much of the old, carries the culture to the masses, and as Dean (2000) writes, "Cultural politics is about altering the boundaries that order American democracy" (p. 78).

Sclove (1995) takes the view that technologies "promote unintended social consequences" (p. 10), and the recognition of this fact has produced a number of concerns. Many have worried that the widespread use of the Internet will harm human interaction and reduce the sense of community in society, though others argue that this is not the case. Esther Dyson also refers to the way Americans in particular revere frontiers, and for her, cyberspace is a new frontier — "a place where you can go and be yourself without worrying about the neighbors" (in Kennedy, Kennedy, & Aaron 1997, p. 640). She says that what attracts people to cyberspace is that it is so different from the community they are accustomed to in their usual lives, and one difference is that cyberspace involves a degree of freedom not possible elsewhere. It brings together many different communities under one heading:

"Formerly a playground for computer nerds and techies, cyberspace now embraces every conceivable constituency: schoolchildren, flirtatious singles, Hungarian-Americans, accountants — along with pederasts and porn fans. Can they all get along?" (in Kennedy, Kennedy, & Aaron 1997, p. 640).

In 1998, an early study by Robert Kraut, a professor of social psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, found that the Internet was dangerous to one's social and psychological well-being. Tranvik (2001) asks the key question about new technologies: "will they cause unimaginable levels of social isolation, or will they bring a new society with a friendlier face?" (para. 1). The fear has been that they will bring more isolation, while many users believe they interact more with others online than they do in life. Cyberspace most certainly does constitute a new community to which virtually anyone may belong, and how helpful or harmful this may be will become clearer in time.

However, seeing the Internet as a separate community does not mean that it is completely isolated from the physical surroundings of the user, nor does it mean a community that cannot be reached by political and social forces from the real world. At one time, it was thought that the Internet could not be controlled, but to a degree, it can. Countries like China and Saudi Arabia have found ways to block large portions of the Internet and criminalize access to those sites. The new technology is liberating and democratizing in that it gives everyone access to information as never before, but the process can be slowed to a great extent by a hostile government and even by attackers such as viruses and worms.

While much of the emphasis has been on the growth in new media technology, in fact all media are becoming more integrated and even coordinated. This creates both a huge body of data for anyone to access and raises more and more concerns about privacy at the same time, as Dean (2002) notes:

"On the one hand, interconnected media exacerbate the drive for content, for the scoop, for information, in their competition for audience. There must be some secret out there that has not yet been revealed. On the other hand, with the abundance of information available on the Internet, cable television, and radio come more personal concerns about the disintegration of privacy" (Dean 2002, pp. 71–72).

Privacy in the new media environment is diminishing by the day as we are all monitored by cameras and other means throughout the day, meaning, as Dean (2002) states, "We are all potential information" (p. 72).

Privacy and Access

In terms of computer technology, different solutions to the problem of privacy have been implemented, with encryption being one of the most widely adopted. Encryption means the coding of messages and data files sent across the Internet, preventing third parties from reading them, while the intended receiver may decode the message using a special key — a block of encoded data that unlocks the message, allowing the receiver to display it as an image, hear it as a sound file, or otherwise recreate it in its original form. This approach can be used not only for Internet file transfers but also for telephone transmissions, the sending of cable and television signals, and other forms of electronic information transfer.

Encryption emerged as a political issue in 1992 when the Clinton Administration proposed a law requiring the inclusion of what became known as a Clipper Chip in every device that could encode messages, thus allowing the government to decode messages under certain circumstances. This proposal was seen as a challenge to privacy. Dockrill (1987) points to the usual concerns about invasion of privacy by computer and finds that many of these scenarios focus upon deliberate efforts of governmental agencies, cloaked within their administrative powers, to amass and utilize more and more information concerning individuals or the activities of individuals or organizations. Dockrill notes:

"Throughout the literature, the shared concern appears to be about the growth in governmental powers in this area and the widespread development of private organizations which collect and disseminate, generally for a fee, both personal and financial information relating to individuals" (Dockrill 1987, pp. 547–548).

The problem is stated clearly by Graham: "The legal community has paid little attention to the consequences for individual privacy of the development of computers" (Graham 1987, p. 1396). Graham does say that the common law has the capacity to protect privacy rights, just as it expanded to combat threats in the past, but he also says that privacy law has lagged behind technology: "Privacy law has failed to respond, as it has in the past, to technological changes that influence the degree of privacy to which we are accustomed" (Graham 1987, p. 1396).

Technology has changed the nature of "privacy" because it has altered the meaning of "public." In an earlier age, people possessed greater anonymity than in the computer age, given the increasing availability of vast stores of data about everyone accessible by computer. The old concept of privacy is thus disappearing, though computer users are realizing this fact more and more and so seek ways to prevent any further erosion of privacy.

The Center for Democracy and Technology concluded in 1997:

"The deployment of key recovery systems designed to facilitate surreptitious government access to encrypted data and communications introduces substantial risks and costs. These risks and costs may not be appropriate for many applications of encryption, and they must be more fully addressed as governments consider policies that would encourage ubiquitous key recovery" ("The Risks of Key Recovery, Key Escrow, and Trusted Third Party Encryption" 1998).

Most of the encryption systems used today, the organization points out, support rather than hinder the prevention and detection of crime. Encryption is used to protect burglar alarms, cash machines, postal meters, and a variety of vending and ticketing systems from manipulation and fraud, and encryption is also being deployed to facilitate electronic commerce by protecting credit card transactions on the Internet and by hindering the unauthorized duplication of digital audio and video. The use of encryption remains uneven, however:

"Most automatic teller machine transactions are protected by encryption, but transactions made by bank staff (which can involve much larger amounts of money) are often not protected. Most Internet electronic mail is still sent 'in the clear' and is vulnerable to interception. Most cellular telephone calls in the U.S. are still sent over the air without the benefit of strong encryption… Members of the law enforcement and intelligence communities continue to express concern about widespread use of unescro wed cryptography. At the same time, these communities have expressed increasing alarm over the vulnerability of 'critical infrastructure.' But there is a significant risk that widespread insertion of government-access key recovery systems into the information infrastructure will exacerbate, not alleviate, the potential for crime and information terrorism" ("The Risks of Key Recovery, Key Escrow, and Trusted Third Party Encryption" 1998).

This is because increasing the number of people with authorized access to critical infrastructure and business data will increase the likelihood of attack, whether by technical means, by exploitation of mistakes, or through corruption. In addition, key recovery requirements, to the extent that they make encryption cumbersome or expensive, can discourage or delay the deployment of cryptography in increasingly vulnerable computing and communications networks.

Encryption is also imperfect and may fail in some situations. Even among email programs, there are different and incompatible methods for accomplishing the task. This can mean that the sender will use an application that is not compatible with the receiver's system, in which case the receiver will not be able to decode the message (Kenworthy & Lang 1998, p. 144).

Thus, it is evident that concerns over privacy are fueling much of the desire for encryption and opposition to any Key Escrow plan. Users do want the government to intervene to make encryption more uniform so that one program will be able to communicate with another, but they do not want the government to possess the means to spy on Internet users. It is also believed that such spying would cause more harm than it would generate benefit for society. While encryption can protect a given message and may contribute a sense of privacy to computer users, the ways of invading privacy increase exponentially. When a user buys something online, for instance, he or she uses encryption to protect a credit card number, and this may be effective. The fact of the purchase itself can become part of a database about products and preferences, however, so that companies can decide who to contact about other products. Companies trade this sort of data and thereby breach privacy all the time — another demonstration that we are all potential information.

Conclusion

Jodi Dean's statement that publicity represents the ideology of technoculture shows that publicity in this view involves a complex clash between the public and the private in a world where privacy is diminished even as people discover new ways of keeping some data secret while publishing more and more data that once would have remained private, either purposely or inadvertently. The nature of democracy is being altered by these changes in ways that the public may not yet fully perceive.