The Personal (Profile) as Political (Blog Two: The Ethics of Technology Series)
In recent weeks, I have had a number of conversations with colleagues about social networking and professional boundaries. The conversation usually begins with the perennial question: Do I let students be my friend? Recently, I found myself confessing to a friend (in-person) that I had completely given up on having a “personal” facebook account. I primarily post accomplishments, social justice campaigns, links to new resources, teaching ideas, etc.
After I made this declaration, I was struck by how starkly I considered the professional and personal divide. It was as if technology was reinforcing the masquerade debunked years earlier by feminist foremothers. Is not the political personal, the personal political? Yes, I can affirm there is some political import to the number of young women in my facebook friend-list who post massive amounts of pictures of their young children. Why do the young men not post these pictures? Do the parents consider the child’s desires or concerns about having a traceable online life from day one? What do co-workers think about the pictures versus family friends? I can also affirm there is some personal import to the many academically affiliated friends who post teaching techniques, publishing accomplishments, and social justice awareness messages. This got me thinking . . . is there a much broader question to be asked about how personal and political choices shape online profiles and vice versa?
Recently a colleague shared the TedTalk by Jer Thorp on “Make Data more Human.” Jer Thorp creates systems to demonstrate abstract data in a human context. For example, he might track twitter comments about people traveling (“I just landed in X”) and then map their locations and moves. This might be helpful to epidemiologists or travel companies. In another example, he takes mobile phone data to mark points where a person has been over the course of multiple years and then map it on the globe. Out of that data he creates a visual representation of a memory book – the time I moved, ran a race, took photos, started a new job, etc. Similarly, many of us on facebook have switched our profile layout to “timeline” which uses a different visual method of representing “you” to the viewers. Thorp’s point in this short presentation is to get us to start thinking about data in a human context. What and whom are affected by this data? Are they affected positively or negatively? What would change if we saw a much larger picture of how data is shared, stored, or used by others?
In response to Thorp’s provocative presentation, I began to think about what one might know about me or even more presumptively, conclude about who I am based on my participation in online profiles. I’m sticking with sites to which I intentionally belong because at least there is some claim to the fact that I have crafted my persona (albeit within the constraints of the software) as opposed to complete random connections like “googling” someone, which I think is truly a testament to the person(al) as public!
I am currently on: www.academia.edu, www.linkedin.com, www.facebook.com. And considering joining Academic Room. I also have numerous profiles on list serve sites. In most cases the information on these profiles is not new or interesting, but a larger “portrait” might arise if (as Thorp suggests) we looked at my use of these list serves and how others were connected to them, essentially providing a narrative about a network. My contention is: when I decide to create a profile on-line, I am engaging in a public, but more importantly political act that simultaneously reduces my privacy (no matter how strict my settings are). Moreover, the content of my profile, its connections (or not) to my other profiles, and other people’s connections to me create a specific type of network. The data tells a story, and as a feminist ethicist, I would contend that the story is undergirded by particular values and even normative behaviors and virtues of the users. Instead of slipping into the false divides of personal and political or private and public, we have the opportunity to lend our feminist tool set to questions about how data tells human stories and how human stories might begin to shape data in ethical ways that lead to a more just and inclusive society (on-line and in-person).