All of us who blog religiously have a mission, that is, a religious mission. We are seeking to instigate political transformation.

Two related things I was thinking about recently:

1) Online Conversations. Helpful or not?

2) Anonymity vs. Transparency on the internet and the “real world”

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Online Conversations. Are they helpful?

It’s one of the the questions of our age. I guess the answer is yes and no, depending on who you are. I personally like online conversations, but I know a lot of people don’t care for them. Case in point, the host of the podcast “Get Up OFF This” Matthew Robinson does not like them very much (skip to minute 42:00). In this particular episode, Matt Robinson urges people to get up OFF arguing on Facebook, and he’s got good reasons to do so. It is undeniably true, to some degree, that the internet can become a battleground of disembodied voices yelling at and talking past one another. And with no context, and nothing at stake, it can get pretty ugly pretty fast, and so often nothing good comes from it.

But, in my experience, online conversations have been fruitful and I’ve learned from them. Yup.

I think I like online chats for the same reason I like blogging and writing in general: I just like writing my thoughts down. Now this is not to say that I like online conversation better than in person conversation, I am just saying that writing, as a practice, helps me. Because I tend to be a right brained “creative” type, I’ve found that  writing helps me organize and sort through my thoughts, helps me to understand what I’m feeling, helps me think through what I think I know, and what I think I believe. Writing, in any form, is meditative for me. I also try to keep in mind what Matthew Segall has pointed out in regard to blogging and online conversation:

Blogging is a public forum, one of the few remaining political sites for a democratic people to work out their self-authentification and self-governance. The Internet remains a virtual environment, but in our catastrophic epoch of the post-human and post-natural, reality itself is increasingly endangered, making virtuality a necessary haven of withdrawal. Those explicitly involved in these online arguments aren’t necessarily the only significant nodes of mutual influence. It seems to me that most often, it is those remaining silent who are influenced most significantly by the dialectic unfolding on screen. Even if their thoughts remain at the level of pre-discursive feeling and imaginal strain for the time being, the stress of silence acts as an alembic forming truly new thoughts that will no longer be trapped in the tug-of-war of old polemics…All of us who blog religiously have a mission, that is, a religious mission. We are seeking to instigate political transformation.

I’ve been the person blogging and commenting for sure, but I’ve also been the person Matt describes above, the silent person who is influenced by what is happening on the screen–Matt himself has influenced me a great deal in this regard. So yeah, there’s good and there’s bad to be had here. This brings me to the next (not so unrelated) topic of this post.

Anonymity vs. Transparency

Recently, I read a great article in aeon magazine titled “Will online anonymity win the war of openness vs privacy?” It’s a good read that describes well our current digital landscape and discusses the struggle by some to keep the internet open and free of censorship, government interference and corporate control by working toward the complete decentralisation of the net and striving to give all users complete anonymity. Some benefits of this would be, of course, increased privacy, and open and free communication unhampered from third parties.

Unfortunately, it would also bring plenty of ills, I’d imagine. For example, hacking and the stealing of intellectual property, trolling, and all the rest of the criminal-type activity associated with things like the dark net would probably be a lot easier. In fact one could argue that the ability for one to remain anonymous on the internet is one of the big reasons (as we touched on above) the internet has such a bad reputation and is often viewed as a cesspool of misogyny, racism, sexism, and hate.

Along these lines, in the same episode of “Get Up Off This” that I mentioned above, host Matthew Robinson made the statement (at about the 29 min. mark), in regard to the recent hacking of Sony Pictures, that he thinks there will be two possible outcomes regarding how privacy is handled or thought about in the future, either 1) We all decide collectively that there is no privacy, online or otherwise or 2) Privacy is still important and online violations of it should become a higher concern.

It’s interesting stuff to think about, and I’m not so sure where I come down exactly on the issue(s). Obviously, there are virtues in privacy. Despite how public and transparent we may think we are, most of us have things we don’t necessarily want the whole world knowing about. It also seems like in order to keep our privacy intact we would have to allow greater government involvement. Personally, when it comes to privacy in the digital age relating to internet data specifically, I resonate more with the European governmental model that approximates a de-facto “human right to privacy,” extending citizen protection beyond state data processing to the private sector. Overall though, I do generally tend to think that transparency is important–for governments, corporations and people–because I think there really is something to be gleaned from that old verse in Luke:

For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open.

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Illustration above by Steve Fuchs

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