From: Matt Norwood <mrn2101@columbia.edu>
  To  : <cpc@emoglen.law.columbia.edu>
  Date: Thu, 09 Mar 2006 18:05:58 -0500

[CPC] Paper 1: Kathy's World

[This is right on point after our in-class discussion today.]

Kathy's World

One of the consequences of having a not uncommon name is that you
sometimes read about things that happened to you that you don't
remember. Last summer, I ran a vanity search on Technorati and came
across a mention of my name on something called "Kathy's World". Kathy's
World, it turns out, is the Microsoft-owned "MSN Spaces" blog of a
16-year-old girl in Clay Center, Kansas named Kathy Beichter. It's pink
and full of exclamation points. Several of these exclamation points
appear in a statement she published in June 2005:

"And...Then....It...Happened!!!! He kissed me!!! Matt Norwood kissed me!
With tongue and everything!"

My immediate reaction to this surprising piece of news was defensive:
"Never met the girl, your honor." But upon delving deeper into Kathy's
World - reading comments from Kathy's friends characterizing my
doppelganger as "nice and cool but hes a horn dog u want a nicer, guy"
and learning about the pregnancy scare that followed several weeks after
that fateful kiss (with tongue /and everything/) - I found myself deeply
disturbed by the privacy implications of Kathy's blogging habits. I
found some of my deep-seated convictions -- that the kids are okay, that
information wants to be free -- giving way to a determination never to
allow my daughters unmonitored access to the Internet. Or to allow them
to learn to read. Or to venture outside unveiled.

----

In his short story "Funes the Memorious", Jorge Luis Borges describes
the life of a man who, paralyzed in an accident, finds himself able to
perceive and recall every detail of the world around him. Funes can
instantly catalog the innumerable leaves on a branch outside of his
bedroom window, giving each a unique name and adding them to the list of
every leaf he has ever seen in his life. He spends his days playing with
his data, optimizing his ability to refer to unique objects and
recreating entire days of sensation from his life. But ultimately, the
narrator concludes, Funes's uncanny ability is limiting:

"With no effort, he had learned English, French, Portuguese and Latin. I
suspect, however, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is
to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming
world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their
presence."

Borges's characterization of Funes is, of course, a prophecy of the
database age. The horror stories of false arrests and identity theft
documented by Robert O'Harrow testify to the danger of over-reliance on
faithful, but stupid, memory. Mistaken identity is a real problem in our
database nation, resulting every year in untold numbers of loans denied
by banks, job applications rejected by employers, and kneecaps broken by
protective older brothers. 

But carelessness is not the only dangerous consequence of the
persistence of social memory -- what happens when Kathy meets Funes? To
what extent do the blogosphere and the Google cache reproduce in
McLuhan's "global village" all the claustrophobia and cultural
conservatism of real-world villages -- what Marx called " the idiocy of
rural life"? I worry about Kathy Beichter, age 25, looking for her first
job out of grad school and being passed over for someone more
"responsible". Or of Kathy Beichter, age 35, explaining her youthful
indiscretions to her children after their classmates come across her
name in a blog archive online. Or of Judge Kathy Beichter, age 50, being
asked to square her stance on abortion with her own activities as a
teenager. Will Kathy ever be able to leave the suffocating confines of
Clay Center? Is there no escape from Kathy's World? 

And if Kathy can't escape, then what about that poor, maligned horn dog
Matt Norwood?

----

The modern American right of privacy is an invention of two wealthy
urbanites, Samuel Warren and Lewis Brandeis. But the "right to be let
alone" was as aspirational in 1890 as the right to self-government in
1776 or the right to equal protection of the laws in 1866: it had been
experienced by an elect few for a short period, and they had found it so
appealing that they demanded its codification. But America had always
been a nation of rural farmers, for whom privacy would always be a
matter of physical logistics, not legal protections. Privacy in a small
town comes from opaque walls and tall fences, and usually not even then.
Small towns have long memories and fast communication networks.
Databases and computer networks have simply brought the city back in
line with the village, ending the century of social conditions that made
Brandeis's privacy possible.

Can nothing be done? Is Scott McNealy right? Do we truly "have no
privacy"? Surely this is hyperbole. We should be able to restrain our
own government in its compulsive information-gathering. We may be able
to discourage private corporations from doing the same. But if private
individuals have MovableType, Google, and Freenet at their disposal, our
ability to protect the citizenry from invasions of their privacy will
run up against the same hard limits as our legislature's efforts to
protect the music industry from its customers. People listen to each
other's music, and people gossip. And that gossip, once published, will
persist somewhere where it can be found, in spite of the law's efforts
to send it down the memory hole.

What does this mean for democracy? I suspect that McLuhan may have
something useful to tell us about the "retribalization" of mankind in
the age of "electric media". His implication of radio technology in the
rise of Nazism and the Holocaust is troublingly vindicated by the same
technology's role in the Rwandan genocide. Surveillance cameras enforce
social caste systems in the UK and, increasingly, the US. But the impact
of online gossip - of the indiscreet friend with a blog - has yet to
reveal its form, except, perhaps, among teenagers, where blog
penetration is high enough to expose the high-school gossip network to
the rest of the world. Perhaps new social norms of discretion and
blogger ethics will emerge and shield the next generation from the
crushing social pressures of adolescence after they grow up. But I'm
concerned that we may all find ourselves living in Kathy's World some
day soon.





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