Welcome to the Panopticon, little author

[julesjones]

Or, "Post in haste, repent at leisure." One of the most useful pieces of advice I was ever given about the online world was back when I was a wee newbie; I was told not to post in anger. Write it if I must, but then leave it. For at least ten minutes, preferably overnight. Come back and look at it when calmed down, and ask myself, "Do I really want to send that?"


This was in the days before Google, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and Alta Vista ruled the search engines. And when a search engine company called Deja News was causing consternation by archiving and indexing the casual conversation on a system called USENET, making it possible to retrieve and read posts that had been made years earlier in the expectation that what was said was ephemeral, the online equivalent of spoken words, gone once the conversation was over. There had always been small specialist archives, but Deja News made it possible for someone to call up the entirety of a person's posting history, see what they said on any subject, and to whom they said it. Casual, semi-private conversation was no longer either casual or semi-private.

Why does this matter? Because the net has a funny effect on people. It dehumanises the social transaction, makes it easy to forget that those are real people on the other end of the wire. Or it simply insulates people from the consequences of their actions. And thus it becomes easy to say things that you'd never say to someone's face, or that you'd never say in front of a camera recording your words for posterity. Things you might find embarrassing to have quoted back to you at a later date.

People have long memories, and it's neither nice nor wise to insult them unnecessarily. But machines have longer memories still, and back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, we were starting to understand what that meant. What goes on the net, stays on the net. You cannot take back your words once they've been said. They remain frozen in time, on some storage medium somewhere, and you can never, ever be quite sure that they won't return to haunt you. With datestamps and IP addresses to prove that yes, it was you who said them.

You can take down the webpage or blog post you wrote when you were drunk and angry, but Google cache will continue to show it to the world for a few hours or days or weeks. And archive.org may well have it in permanent archives. You can ask them to remove it, and they will, eventually. In the meantime, people will have been making screen shots. If you comment on someone else's blog, you're just going to have to hope that it's one that allows you to delete your own posts, and that it's not set to email copies of comments to the blog owner.

You can try to keep things private. Locked LiveJournal posts? Well, there was that episode when someone offered a useful service that just happened to ask people to login using their LJ password. And a couple of months later, the owners had enormous fun publicly posting the contents of locked posts they'd gained access to because a friend of the poster had subscribed to this service. Private bulletin boards get hacked. Oh, and that private mailing list may be exposed when some virus scoops up the contents of someone's hard drive, and starts emailing it to random addresses. I've been on the receiving end of such virus-forwarded emails, and it took a formal complaint to the infectee's ISP to get them to clean up their computer. Private tantrums are much, much better than public, but you can't assume that they'll stay private.

None of this means that you must be a saint at all times, never saying anything controversial or nasty, not even in passive-aggressive fashion or in a private forum. After all, I'm not known for my shy and retiring nature online. You'll go nuts, and you'll be boring. And people will forgive a lot, if you make an honest apology for something you regret in the cold light of morning. But own your words. Because they will surely own you, come the day you feel a need to deny them.

Welcome to the Panopticon, little author. Where there are a million cameras watching you, each and every one of them recording you for posterity. Try not to show your knickers in public too often.

[No, this isn't aimed at anyone in particular. I've been meaning to write something along these lines for months, wrote the first draft over a month ago, and have been sitting on it ever since, waiting for the opportunity to post it on a quiet day when nobody was going to take it personally. I think this roughly translates as "when hell freezes over", so it's going up today.]

Comments

[lisabea.livejournal.com]

Man. I read this and I thought, "What did I say?" And then I thought "What haven't I said?" heh.

One thing I detest is when folks take private emails and make them public at the expense of the author and for the entertainment of all. Not my bag.

[julesjones]

I really have been mumbling to myself about this post for some months now, and while it's addressed to authors, it applies to publishers and sundry other folk as well. The "drunk and angry" is the only clue you get as to exactly when I decided that people needed a reminder about the perils of posting in haste. Over the last couple of years far too many people have demonstrated that they think that if they pull the blog post or comment or yahoogroup or whatever, it will magically disappear as if it had never been posted.

I detest the publishing of private email (other than obvious exceptions such as someone making threats in private email). But even if you can trust someone not to do that, it's possible for private email to leak by accident. I was on a private mailing list for a good few years, and every so often we had to remind people who used it as a safe place to vent that even though it was private and unarchived, they should not be posting anything they couldn't live with if it got out, because there was no guarantee that it wouldn't.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

I've had to learn not to post angry emails first thing in the morning (my job involves a lot of interacting with other time zones, so it's not uncommon to get thrown into a debate at 5am). The hour long commute to work is an excellent time to evaluate a good response. It's an awfully long time to rue a poor one.

[julesjones]

Yes, multi-timezone stuff that has you online when your brain thinks you should be in bed is particularly bad for this.

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

I think this roughly translates as "when hell freezes over", so it's going up today. {giggle} It's particularly pertinent over in one of my fannish mailing lists where the bunfight is getting very VERY stupid...

But people really DON'T think, do they? I've read some mindboggling things (and sometimes with the later disclaimer "I was drunk when I posted this" as this that will somehow erase the stupd...); I've also seen people take down a whole site - either in a huff or because they have good reasons for wanting the world to forget it was ever there - without seeming to consider that there's a wonderful little thing called "wayback machine"...

[julesjones]

The wayback machine has certainly given me an incentive to not press Return on occasion -- and you know what a well-mannered, sweet-tempered, not in the least bit INTJ-like person I am...

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

you know what a well-mannered, sweet-tempered, not in the least bit INTJ-like person I am... and what a 'think carefuuly before inserting foot in mouth' type I am :)

[hafren.livejournal.com]

I think a big problem with email is that it is used as if it were conversation when it actually has far more in common with the letter. The times I have become angry with an email (though I can usually manage to follow your advice and not sound angry) have almost always been when I misunderstood something due to the lack of the Irony Font. Recently I protested (politely, as it happened) about some sexist language in a post, and the guy's friend replied that I had quite missed the irony. "If this were a pub conversation you would see the raised eyebrow and wry grin". Well, quite - it isn't, is it? Email has neither tone, not facial expressions, nor body language as conversation does (and smilies, if people even use them, are a clodhopping substitute that doesn't often cut it). In this respect email is much more like letters, except that sometimes it has the immediacy of speech. Yet we not only don't think so carefully before answering an email as we would before replying to a letter; we don't read with the same care either (though I tend to miss irony in letters too). I actually think we need some print substitute, like agreed fonts, for tone of voice. What would make a good Irony Font? Going into sans-serif from serif or the other way around?

PS

[hafren.livejournal.com]

Trying to think why I can see irony in stories when I miss it in emails - because the voice is there; if it's well written I can hear the tone in which the character speaks.

Re: PS

[julesjones]

Which is also why irony in emails often works a lot better with people who know each other well, of course. And people then forget that someone you've known for ten years will be able to read the tone of your email a lot more easily than a stranger would -- for example, I would not have said to a stranger what I said in my second reply to sallymn.