When Would You Stand Up? (Part I)

When would you stand up? (Part I)

Throughout the book I kept wondering why didn’t more people stand up and try to stop the panopticon that they were helping to create. Why did everyone become so enamored with the social networking sites? Why did the whole world decide to place the SeeChange camera’s everywhere and share them with everyone? Why did the world give their wholehearted support to the transparency movement? And how could people sit idly by as The Circle took over the government?

Stage 1: The Networking

            This stage at first glance seems pretty harmless. You go out to a restaurant and you share a picture and/or “zing” a review. You go on a hike with your friends, and you recommend it on a chat room. These little updates not only show your friends what you’re doing, but also provide them with information that could inform their decisions on where to go this weekend or what to buy.

            But this technology causes issues. People begin to feel left out. They know if their friends are hanging out without them, and they can’t do anything about it. People begin to see social networking as a replacement for real experiences. Why hike a mountain when you can see the view anyways? People begin to see their online lives as more legitimate than their real ones, and personal relationships suffer as their number followers/friends on their particular website grows ever greater.

            So would you stand up and say no?? Probably not. Although it may not be an ideal world, I don’t think there is any harm is sharing your views/life experience, and if people want to be boring and live through their online life, that’s their prerogative.

Stage 2: Surveillance

            The SeeChange camera facilitates the next stage of the takeover. Not only can you see almost anywhere in the world with brilliant detail, but anyone else can too. There may be people who place SeeChange cameras without sharing the feed publicly, but it doesn’t seem like that particular method really catches on. The technology is instantly hailed a revolutionary way to limit crime, while giving people a chance to see the world.

            But this technology too has many issues. People are more and more likely to “see the world” from the comforts of their own home, rather than actually go out and do it. This is helpful to people with disabilities, but for the rest of the world just makes people lazy. People begin to have literally every aspect of their lives on display to the whole world, as the cameras are placed in their houses and shared to all of their friends.

            But would you stand up and say no? Would you fight for the camera’s to only be allowed in public places? Would you use the cameras to see a foreign country rather than save up to visit yourself? Would you put the cameras in your home, allowing them to see every insignificant detail of your daily life?

            Now this is the stage where I started to get a little nervous. I could see the benefits of the spread of such technology, but the loss of privacy started to scare me. I think this is the point where I would start to break away from the pack. I wouldn’t let the cameras in my house, and I would probably make the few cameras that I did place private.

            Yet the rest of the world, at least in Eggers’ mind, wouldn’t follow suit. The SeeChange cameras took over the world by storm, and with them, another layer of privacy and personal freedoms was removed.

(This blog post will be continued in part II, coming later today).