Electronic communication enduringly exposes once-ephemeral social exchange to scrutiny

Evidence

“We are used to face-to-face interaction where words disappear.… I assumed that keyboard communication was like a letter or a phone call, but now I understand that it doesn’t disappear. The myth is that electronic communication is invisible.…” He was a brilliant research scientist at a large pharmaceuticals company that I called “Drug Corp” in my 1988 book, In the Age of the Smart Machine. I had spent several years visiting the research group there as they shifted much of their daily communications from face-to-face meetings to DIALOG, one of the world’s first “computer conferencing” systems. DIALOG was a precursor to a technology that we now call “social media.” The DIALOG platform created a new social space in which the scientific community at Drug Corp elaborated and extended “their networks of relationships, access to information, thoughtful dialogue, and social banter,” as I described it then. They embraced DIALOG with great enthusiasm, but it did not end well. “In time,” I wrote, “it became clear that they had also unwittingly exposed once evanescent and intangible aspects of their social exchange to an unprecedented degree of hierarchical scrutiny.” The interviews that stretched across those years documented the scientists’ gradual awakening to new dangers as dimensions of personal experience that were implicit and private suddenly became explicit and public in ways that they did not anticipate and with consequences that they lamented deeply. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 842

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Zuboff’s own earlier work and to general surveillance studies on the ‘textualization’ of conversation. — connects to: Living publicly online normalizes constant scrutiny of one’s actions — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 382; Digitized social information creates a relational data layer that magnifies gossip and suspicion — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 570; Surveillance of social text drives people toward perfunctory, impersonal communication — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 844 (+4 more)
• QUESTION: The scientists’ discovery that e-mail ‘doesn’t disappear’ is mirrored today; worth tracing the shift in awareness from 1988 to the present.

Broader Connections

• Modern communications technology has fundamentally reshaped human consciousness and social relations #expands (0.80)
• Surveillance of social text drives people toward perfunctory, impersonal communication #complicates (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 844