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August 30, 2001THE RILEY REPORT – August 2001 By Thomas B.Riley (Tom@Rileyis.com)
Following is the Riley Report for August 2001. Please feel free to pass this on as you see fit. If you wish to use any part of the Report in an offline publication please acknowledge the author or contact the author if to be fully republished offline. If you are not currently subscribed to the Riley Report (there is no charge) you can email info@rileyis.com and simply put subscribe in the body of the text. You can also go to the Riley Report at: http://www.rileyis.com/rileyreport/ and subscribe there.
This month’s column deals with the wide social impacts that new information technologies are having on 21st century life and that are leading to less interaction of people offline while bringing people closer together online. This is having the overall effect of creating a new paradigm of a world less in communication, not more, while communication technologies proliferate and become more sophisticated. These trends indicate we need a wider debate about how we will continue to develop a technological infrastructure while protecting our humanity. As humans themselves become more integrated with technology we are going to have to develop new ways to continually define ourselves as human beings.
I have written a fiction novel, called Time’s End, on the possible abuses of surveillance and technology in our society if these trends continue. The novel is to be published this autumn and further details will be forthcoming in the next edition of the Riley Report.
NEW TECHNOLOGIES: THE CHANGING NATURE OF SOCIETY AND THE EMERGENCE OF NEW RIGHTS
There has been much in the news in recent months about the rise of surveillance technologies in our society. Everywhere we go today, the individual is under some form of surveillance. From inside the sanctity of your own home to the wide-open streets of your neighbourhood, to trolling the Internet, chances are you are under the watchful eye of a surveillance camera. Go to your local convenience store or your large super store, and somewhere there is a camera recording your every movement. From the airport lounge to the city street, somewhere, someplace, we are being caught on a camera, tracked and recorded. Go online to shop, exchange emails, visit web sites, the chances are strong that someone is watching, whether it be your employer, a company seeking to profile online people, or a hacker who might have taken over your computer. Video cameras in stores and on streets are the most visible manifestation of our growing surveillance society. The Information Age has brought profound change to society and a multitude of opportunities for the individual. It is also bringing an increasing dependence by people on the technology itself, which is shaping the ways we are acting as human beings. Following are a few examples of this dependency.
In many communities around the world, cameras can now scan out faces in the crowd and, the remote camera being linked to a database of some sort, can run the faces being scanned through the database. This face recognition technology is already operating in communities in the United States and the United Kingdom. Many argue this is a serious invasion of privacy, while government officials, police forces and politicians make the case that this reduces crime. Studies on the problem are contradictory, with some showing that, in fact, there is little reduction of crime and that criminals just move to areas where there are fewer cameras, to statistics showing significant reduction in crime. An academic study in the UK brought out the fact that many people in different communities felt that with the rise of surveillance cameras, there are less police on the streets. This, the study states, has altered the relationship between the community and the police. When there was a visible presence of the police, members of the community would be in communication with them on a daily basis and the citizen and the police would be able to work together in understanding the local problems. This sense of community and cooperation declined radically with the rise of the camera and brought to many communities an increased fear about the rise of crime and the lack of interaction with the police.
The camera is now everywhere and there is no place we can go on this planet where the chances of being caught as an image by some piece of technology does not exist. Web cameras (cams) are becoming increasingly popular.) One site allows you to watch, on the web, the poolside frolics of people on a Princess Cruise line (stage.web cam resource.com/regional). This site also picks up people in various vacation spots around the world (unbeknownst to the subjects).
Cases are emerging of people surreptitiously placing web cams, hooked to their computers, into people’s homes, including their bedrooms, and broadcasting live over the Internet. Do a search on the web and you can find some web site, displaying a web cam sitting on some corner in some city in the world silently watching people go by. This is making voyeurs of many people who passively receive gratification in watching others but not participating, much like the experience wrought by TV.
Celebrities are caught unawares somewhere and images of them can be telegraphed via the Internet to devoted fans. Cameras ride astride the satellites in space and are now so sophisticated that a person walking in a field or sitting on a porch, or wherever, can be caught in a digital image. Humans on this planet are incrementally being literally cloaked in an electronic blanket which cannot be easily shed. An individual may not be under surveillance at any given time but the potential for a total surveillance society exists.
Yet, video surveillance serves as the best symbol of a wider endemic problem facing humanity – the increasing dehumanization effects that new technologies are having on all of us. This extends beyond just information technologies but outwards to the sciences where, as an example, genetic engineering of foods, and the capacity to now clone humans, is beginning to change the natural order of the universe as we knew it up until the late twentieth century.
The example of data recognition technology, linked with live video cameras on the streets, illustrates the diminishing face-to-face interaction in our society. Strict privacy laws have often been cited as the means to control the proliferation of cameras in our society, and thus curb greater and greater intrusion of the privacy of all citizens by giving individuals control over how their information is used. But this violation of our privacy is just the first manifestation (and partial solution) of a wider phenomenon of the increasing dehumanization of people due to the radical shifts our society has undergone as a result of our propensity to so willingly embrace new technologies. Every time a video camera secretly captures an image of all or a part of us we are slightly diminished. No matter the social good or the fact that, in many cases it does catch criminals, such as from videotapes during robberies, that are then broadcast on television in the hope some good citizen will recognize the criminal and call in.
Thousands of pages, millions of words, and countless articles, essays, research papers and books have been written on the rise of the use of surveillance technologies. Micro-technologies have been available for over two decades that allow an individual’s conversations to be secretly taped. Concerned parents in many countries install mini-cameras in their homes to be able to monitor, from their work, the behaviour of their baby sitters or nannies back at home. People can build their own web sites and simply click in and watch what is going on at home. The examples of this abound. These technologies continue to become an integral part of our lives, whether we have agreed to this or not.
When we use these technologies we are somehow a little less human, a little less a part of the community of Humanity. For if these technologies were used just for limited purposes to further the social good, such as ensnaring criminals and helping in the battle against crime, there might be an argument that the greater public good is served. But this is no longer case.
The phenomena of remote communication and increasing removal of direct interaction between people, is the greater social problem being brought on by our employing modern technologies. Video surveillance is only a part of the problem. In the workplace, employers can monitor the daily activities of their employees, including looking at their email. In the latter example, many governments have made this activity legal, arguing the rights of the employer prevail over the privacy rights of the individual, the employee. And even when there are privacy rights, the employer is often still allowed to do this, though with some restrictions. At any given time, we could be watched and the number of keystrokes we are making on an encrypted message could be monitored and counted from a remote location. It has been recently discovered that the FBI has this technology and is now using it in their fight against crime. Civil libertarians worry that this stroke counting technology could be used by governments to monitor any individual or group engaged in valid political dissent.
The problem moves outward from there for it is not just video surveillance technology that is changing the face of technology and our relationship (and fascination) with technology.
In the case of email, this is now a tool for people who do not want to communicate directly with other individuals. On the plus side, email has allowed millions of people around the world to communicate and share information. It is a personal and an organizational tool. Individuals who have lost touch with each other over the years have now linked up again thanks to the Internet. Families can communicate with other members of the family and small businesses have been given advantages because of their ability to reach out to the world, to cite a few examples. People can share and communicate as never before.
However, at the same time emails are beginning to absorb people’s lives, and millions and millions of messages soar around the networks of the world daily. Spamming, junk mail, jokes, cc’s from someone in the office, trivial queries, and unneeded and unwanted communications now preoccupy millions of people in their daily lives. Many people almost, literally, live in cyberspace, finding the nature of this new world addictive and all-encompassing. Employers use email to tell employees they are fired, or that they have to work over the weekend or face losing their job. Email is liberating while it is also a trap. More importantly, people will say in an email the most trivial or outrageous of things because the person is not in front of them. Hate mail abounds.
Jeering comments about colleagues proliferate. Anonymous email accounts, which do afford extensive privacy on the Net to an individual, also become the tool through which individuals can post vitriolic messages or make borderline slanderous comments (and, on the plus side, freely express their political and other opinions, thus bringing a new form of freedom of expression.). All of these phenomena hold within them a paradox. On the one hand the new technologies have liberated people from old paradigms, bringing freedoms and a tool to participate and interact with people and society, while on the other hand creating a society of people who less and less communicate with each other directly. It is also bringing a climate where we can never truly know if we are being observed and who might or might not be watching. This phenomenon of someone surreptitiously watching us was once considered paranoia. It is now known as a fact.
The Internet has brought the capacity to enter the world of information and knowledge in new and marvellous ways. People can go online and shop, book flights, find exotic travel locations or old friends. The functions are endless in this new interactive world where the concept of time and distance has been radically changed. The dark side of the Internet is not just the proliferation of hacking, illegal pornography and scams to relieve people of their money, but the controls being put on the Internet by authoritarian and semi-authoritarian countries. Despite early, idealistic prognostications of the Internet as a freewheeling space where democracy and freedom would flourish, it has become a place that remarkably mirrors the good and bad side of human nature.
Each advancement made by Mankind, has always brought consequences, good or bad, for the society of the time. In the case of the rise of technologies in the past 100 years, what we are witnessing is, in incremental ways, a diminishing of humanity. For these technologies, especially the Internet, are on one hand bringing people together, but also bringing serious social problems, especially the lessening of direct, personal, interactive communication. This trend actually started with television. This medium brought the world into the homes of people. The ascendancy of television in the delivery of news resulted in a rising opposition to the Vietnam War in the United Stares and around the world. A violent confrontation in a small country in Asia became a symbol of anti-war sentiment and an indictment against the brutality of war. TV brought the world closer but in so doing created a deeper phenomenon. TV is an intimate technology, in that it comes right to the space of the individual, whether it is being watched in the home, the office, the store, or wherever the individual is located. It is now so universal that TVs are becoming common in cars and sport utility vehicles.
This intimacy of TV creates the illusion that the person is there and part of the event. This partly explains the rise of celebrity stalking. Deranged people interpret the phenomenon to mean that individual is a part of their lives. On a wider scale, TV has produced so many millions of bits and bytes of information that the individual cannot properly absorb whatever is being presented. Thus, the sound byte and the famous expression, “the dumbing down of America”; for this, read “of the world”. People who watch a lot of TV news consider themselves well informed yet there is a kind of illiteracy to this, as TV can only skim the surface of the depths that lie beneath any one issue. This might explain the phenomenon as to why in the past decade TV networks are increasingly cutting to the “breaking news” story, which in the beginning were important national events, whereas now it can be a small plane crash in some remote part of the country, or some seemingly trivial event of interest only to a local audience, or the capturing of some criminal that we really don’t need to know about, especially when it can be thousands of miles away from where we live.
The chattering classes proliferate on TV, interpreting events as they see them and telling us what is important, while we, as an aggregate people, increasingly understand less and less about what is going on. Illiteracy is on the rise in most developed countries.
In our developed countries we are witnessing, in large cities and communities, a certain franticness entering into our lives. People are busier than ever, pressures are high in the workplace to produce, the pace of life is accelerating, there is more anger, road rage is on the rise, and in many families both parents work while also trying to raise children, creating more demands on their lives. There is a quickening pace to society that did not exist a decade ago. And all this is occurring at a time of new and sophisticated technologies, which are supposed to make our lives easier. Wireless technologies now make it possible to be literally “connected” 24 hours a day. High Tech companies are building new and sophisticated technologies, which will ensure we are connected, in a seamless and invisible way, to the Internet in all of our daily lives. TV is now a daily presence in our lives and can be found in all manner of places, as we never quite escape it in the course of our daily routines. Has this deep penetration of TV made us a happier, peaceful, more productive, enlightened society, as the soothsayers and readers of bones told us it would back in the 1950s? No. So why do we consistently think that the proliferation and spreading of new technologies will make our lives better? It is time we started to think of technology as a tool we selectively use and control in our lives rather than the phenomenon it is now. We need more self-reflection and debate on the nature of our technologies.
Perhaps we need to take a step back from all this technology we are engulfed in and give ourselves a rest from it. This is a heresy in these days of rapid Internet growth, but whatever we do we need to start thinking about this on a much deeper level before we become slaves to the very technology we believe is enlightening and freeing us from the problems of the past. We need to recapture and rekindle our humanity, and create new values for our increasing high tech, “connected” world.
Over the centuries we have seen the rise of participatory democracy, followed by the wide introduction, in many countries of the world, of the rule of law followed by the evolution, throughout the twentieth century, of ever-widening human rights. We have made progress. But now we need to go further. The latest development is the Information Age and, during the ascendancy of the Information Age, we have seen an increasing demand for information rights (as part of our basic human rights). These rights have included privacy, rights for wider freedom of expression, more accountability from government through the releasing of more information. The latter contains within it the idea that government information is actually owned by the people, and that the state has a duty to provide information to better inform the citizen and allow the individual citizen to be part of our growing knowledge-intensive society. But we now need to go to the next stage. Our next step forward will have to deal with the real changes humanity is going through as a result of not only the penetration of the new technologies in our lives, but the fact they are becoming an integral part of our lives. Humanity and technology are now coming interdependent on each other and as a result we are viewing a lessening our basic humanity. Thus, we now must move into an era where we have the inalienable right to be human. This is going to be a significant challenge as we are in the midst of such enormous change we cannot predict, with any certainty, how we will evolve as a society. But as technologies become more and more a part of our lives, now is the time to start a dialogue as to how we will assert our basic humanity. We now need to move ourselves to the next level: the Age of Humanity. But such an Age will only come with a significant shift to self-awareness about what and who we are as a people. The challenge is daunting but doable.
Thomas B. Riley
Chief Executive
Commonwealth Centre for Electronic Governance
http://www.electronicgov.net
Visiting Professor, University of Glasgow
Riley Information Services Inc.
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