Interview mit Howard Rheingold
Interview mit Howard Rheingold
| “Many people are unaware to which degree their self-expressions are available to many people they don't know.” |
Phänomene, Szenarien und Denkanstöße
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Howard Rheingold is known as the inventor of the term "virtual community", the first executive editor of the online edition of the Wired Magazine “HotWired” and visiting lecturer for the communication department of the Stanford University.
Is the Internet a rather private or public space?
The default is definitely a public space. Unless you take strong technical measures to insure privacy, whatever you post is going to be reproducible, distributable and potentially online forever. You can't get much more public than that.
On his understanding of the term “publics”:
Of course there is a lot of political theory about “the public sphere” and one of the arguments that have come up is that there is not just one public sphere. Originally, Habermas’ public sphere was the traditional political and intellectual discourse of the (European) “bourgeois public”. It was essentially white, middle class males, however especially over the last 50 years we have of course seen people, who are not white, not middle class and not male, influencing public opinion. Those movements have been called “counter-publics”. Feminism, and gay and lesbian movements are good examples of people who were left out of what was considered the public sphere, and who made their own counter-public, by forming their own “gender publics”. The civil rights movement is another example of people forming their own public. They created a public in the sense of various media - from face-to-face to publications of various kinds. What is increasingly important to the formation of publics is the access to communication - Now that is not just print and broadcast but all the media that are available online. The formation of publics is much easier and more rapid and fluent than it ever was before. The plurality of the public spheres depends on the plurality of the contributions.
How the rapid growth of social media is confusing many people and how individuals are using the Internet as a tool to build their identity:
There is a certain degree of confusion among many people. They often don’t know when they do things online when it is public and when it is not. I think there is an illusion of privacy. This is because people are in the comfort of their private homes when they are participating online. Many people are unaware to which degree their self-expressions are available to many people they don't know.
I think that the Internet has brought some changes to what we traditionally understand as “identity”. For most of history, physical presence has been regarded as our frame and limit to marketing our identity. So, the presentation of self depended on who was visible in the physical environment. However, over time it has extended to an invisible environment where people are not physically present. This was first true for people of public interest like politicians and artists but is now true for everybody. Today our identities are available in the form of text and multimedia to the whole world. Nevertheless, you can modify how you present yourself according to what particular forum you interact in. There are all these social clusters that one participates in and they are somewhat collapsed on the Internet in a way we can't completely analyze yet.
What is perceived as private and public and how to enable people to take advantage of these new conditions? The reasons for violating ones privacy can be divided into embarrassment and control. If somebody can see you naked that might be considered embarrassing and as some kind of a breach of privacy. But that does not necessarily give the people who see you naked control over you. On the other hand, if the state or a private individual is able to surveil you and to obtain private information about you that enables them to influence or even control your behavior in some way - That is a very serious danger.
Education is the most effective and the most practical way to equip people. There is a group of people who voluntarily provide sensitive information. The famous drunken college photo on Facebook is a good example of that can be harmful to them when applying for a job. I think the best way is to teach the children. Like taking them to the sidewalk and showing them how to cross the street in order to equip them for a life in the automobile age. This is because young people need to be equipped for life before they get online.
I think there needs to be education about the degree of how information about them is available on the Internet and how it can impact their lives, and about what control they have, if any - Are there any privacy controls in the social network service that they are using? What kind of self-restraint on their own behavior is appropriate - in what circumstances, for what reasons? It is fairly simple to educate people about the difference between privacy as embarrassment and privacy as control but they are not really discussed. They are not among the facts of life that parents talk to their kids about. This all happened very rapidly and with extremely rare exceptions, I don't see it at schools.
How should, and how can the enabling and educating of people be implemented into policy?
Other than international agreements on what is widely agreed to be criminal behavior, a lot of problems have to do with cultural differences regarding norms. Norms of privacy are very different from place to place. There are places like Japan were people share a very dense living-space. Hence special norms about pretending and acting as if you can’t hear one another have developed. If there was a general political agreement about regulating the Internet (of course the internet is international and growing in all different countries all with their own laws) states could try to control their own citizens. Luckily it is very difficult (near to impossible) to make some kinds of general regulations.
Furthermore, the danger of states manipulating and controlling the thoughts and speech of citizens are so much greater then the dangers of unregulated speech (including privacy infringements). So overall I think, the idea to create some kind of international regulation is really a threat to the generative creativity and the use of the Internet for political purposes. I think that education is most important to equip people to use the net to contribute to society while also enabling individual privacy solutions.
We have seen that play out in China, Iran and in the Middle East where people who are seeking freedom of expression use the Internet to organize, and the state uses regulation of the Internet to try to control that expression. That is the great danger when you have some kind of international regulation other than, as I said, on criminal activities.
Regulating the Internet raises the question of anonymity and (governmental) surveillance:
In terms of anonymity and openness the distinction must be made between the Internet in general and any particular forum on the Internet. Of course a particular forum on the Internet can institutionalize it's own rules - for instance that you have to have a verified identity. People who have verified identities have proven to become more reasonable in their statements online. Most of the unacceptable “drive-by comments” don't have verified and identifiable names.
Having said that, I think there are several very strong examples where it is important to be anonymous. There are whistleblowers e.g. exposing corruption and dangers for the public safety, and they need to have protection. There are individuals who seek to escape substance abuse and who help others to escape substance abuse - they require anonymity. Another example are victims of domestic abuse. Political dissidents are perhaps the most important example it is important to be able to speak freely without the fear of state punishment for statements about political positions. I think there are very strong arguments for maintaining a place of anonymity and not executing technical measures that prohibit it. States already have a lot of tools to use surveillance on their citizens.
The main idea of David Brin’s book “The Transparent Society” says that we cannot stop complete surveillance anymore, so the best thing we can do is to make the collected data accessible for everyone thereby surveiling the surveiller:
This is an interesting idea philosophically but how much will anybody be willing to bet that states are going to give up the asymmetry of surveillance that they have. I'm not optimistic that the authorities are going to allow this to happen. If there is some kind of technical invention that enables you to see the officials while they are watching you that might be a really good idea - I just practically don't see it happen.
Also, when Brin wrote that, we did not have the automatic facial recognition software that we have now. Not only do we have the surveillance cameras in most urban areas, but those cameras can actually identify people automatically. There is a great danger in that ability of the state to identify individuals. But even if the people have the ability to surveil back - Who are they going to surveil?
| Howard Rheingold | |
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Howard Rheingold ist amerikanischer Sozialwissenschaftler und Autor. Er befasst sich seit Jahrzehnten mit den soziokulturellen und politischen Auswirkungen neuer Technologien und den dadurch ermöglichten Kommunikationsformen. Er hat Psychologie am Reed College der State University of New York studiert. Seit 1985 hat er an The WELL – am ehesten als Bulletin Board System zu beschreiben – teilgenommen. 1994 war er an der Gründung von Hotwired beteiligt, der Website des Wired Magazine. Mit seinem 1993 erschienenen Buch „Virtual Community - Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier“ prägte Rheingold den Begriff „virtuelle Gemeinschaft“. Sein Buch: „Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution“ (2002) ist eine Untersuchung neuer Internet- und Lifestyle-Technologien. Sein jüngstes Werk ""Net Smart. How to Thrive Online"" (2012) handelt von einem bewussten Umgang mit den Möglichkeiten, die das Web 2.0 bieten und in dem Rheingold fünf Dimensionen von digital literacy unterscheidet (attention, participation, collaboration, crap detection, network smarts) unterscheidet. |
