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Kafka vs. Orwell: Metaphors About Electronic Privacy
Eric_Grimm writes "Carl Kaplan of the New York Times has done an interesting story on a draft law review article (click the "download paper" icon for a PDF version)
relating to the metaphors that should be employed to assist legislators in understanding the personal data protection or "electronic privacy" debate currently raging in Congress and state legislatures. Both Kaplan's story and the law review article are well worth a read."
http://partners.nytimes.com/2001/02/02/technology/ 02CYBERLAW.html
nobody else is so pretentious as to sully High Literature in the service of tech advocacy issues...
::I will not moderate my opinions for your stinking karma
Now, not only do they know that you're a dog, but they know what breed you are, what kind of dog food you eat, and what brand of chew toys you like.
I guess that's what they call progress nowadays.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Personally, I would think maybe something like "Brazil" would be better, but it has been so long since I have seen the movie. As I recall, the movie is so wild that it might be utterly incomprehensible to the very lawyers that we would want to educate.
So I wonder what would be a better illustration. Maybe something by one of the existentialists?
gack, it is late, and my mind has turned to mush.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Finally, a mass audience of people (thanks, ironically enough to the New York Times -- think Mitnick, choke!) are waking up to the importance of metaphors in computing.
/.!) for waking me up to computer metaphorics and making computers way cool for me -- I wouldn't be here otherwise! -- and to Rob Kling of SLIS at the U of Indiana at Bloomington (who's the point-man in socioinformatics).
Computer metaphorics rock! Not only that, but they're hugely overlooked by most geeks, who are more interested in code rhetoric/tweaking than visual/textual/content rhetoric/tweaking (as it should be!). Nevertheless, I feel extremely vindicated that someone else, seemingly independently, has come up with the idea that a good controlling metaphor can, so to speak, move mountains -- both in computing and outside of it. Now if only they'd had a good one for the DeCSS case...
And, yeah, computer metaphorics sounds arcane and weird, but it's useful in so many different ways -- interface/web/etc. design, computer pedagogy, and socioinformatic study in general are just the ones I can come up with off the (damp) top.
Also, I have to thank Professor Neil Randall, of the University of Waterloo (mad phat props, Neil, I know you're out there and reading
Hmmm, also this looks personally promising for me...don't tell me that by the time I do my PhD in this, there'll actually be an existing body of working theorists! Frabjuous day!
Sign me, metaphorically speaking, accourse,
Interrobang
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
privacy is a particularly complex issue. as i try to teach my students, it's a subject we only began to talk about when it began to disappear. as such, it's a name for a thing that doesn't exist -- or the wrong name for something new that does now exist. the trick comes in specifying what exactly that thing is and is not -- and, in that regard, i think it's reasonable to say that metaphors are ultimately counterproductive, because they try to describe something new in terms of the old.
but eric grimm is a very, very thoughtful person, and i hope that these remarks might serve to build on what he has written, rather than to tear it down.
This is an interesting article, but the question I have after reading it is this: why use a metaphor at all?
I remember hearing about a study in one of my political science classes where a number of students were given a problem that involved a country that was a threat to the United States because it had interests in spreading its boarders. There were two sets of students dealing with the same problem. The only difference between the two sets was that one set had a problem that used names that sounded similar to the names of Cities and politicians involved in Cuba in the 1960's and the other related to the Cities and politicians that were related to Nuremburg in the early 1940's. You can probably guess how it turned out but suffice to say, the students saw the connections--whether consciously or not--and settled on a plan of attack that would defend against either the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Nazi regime.
The point I'm trying to make is using metaphors to explain complex situations will always imply facts that are not necessarily true when carried from one situation to the next, and their use is, for the most part, inherently misleading. This situation needs to be looked at as an example of its own, as it surely will be when it is used as a metaphor for the next paradigm shift 40 years from now.
-- PhatKat
... is the BOFH!!!
Ever read Mark Turner's The Literary Mind? Run, don't walk, find a copy, struggle through it, and then come back and reread what you just wrote.
There's a big difference between metaphors and parallelisms (in a literary sense), whether or not those parallelisms are being done with direct metaphors, or similes, catachresis, whatever. A lot of metaphors you simply cannot and should not get away from (see Ortony as well). Your example doesn't wash, because what you're describing is a parallelism, not a metaphor. My handy Holman and Harmon Handbook To Literature says that a metaphor is "an analogy identifying one object with another and ascribing to the first object one or more qualities of the second." Metaphors therefore don't necessarily "imply facts that are not necessarily true when carried from one situation to the next," because with many metaphors, there's simply not enough area of congruency to make workable more points of comparison than the stated or obvious. Many metaphors (such as "the leg of a table" or "the keystone of an argument") don't imply much in the way of facts at all, really. And metaphors are not necessarily "inherently misleading," because, if you know anything about metaphors, you know that you just can't get away from them. Even the term "misleading" is, dare I say, a metaphor. Only bad metaphors are misleading (and then not always), and that's exactly what the paper is trying to correct.
Metaphors do provide a useful and necessary way for human beings to assimilate information -- mainly by symbolically linking the unknown to the known. Therefore we can shorten the learning curve for those not "in the know" about these complex issues (like computer privacy, reverse engineering, encryption, etc.). Considering that these people are going to be making the rules that will affect all of our future internet dealings, don't you think it's fair, and even right, to give them as much of a leg up as they need?
(Sigh...shouldn't've gotten started...)
Interrobang
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
But how is it possible to live in a world without metaphors?
Ok, sure, metaphors simplify the situation. I'm sure that everybody who reads the New York Times (and most of the people who read slashdot minus the Natalie Portman/grits/Goatsex contingent) is a fairly intelligent person. With that it mind, even the extremely intelligent will not be able to fully grasp and articulate all the intricasies of the privacy battle today. The situation is simply too complex and too fluid in order to explain coherantly. Would you really want someone to go through a forty five minutes introductory speech everytime someone wanted to discuss a point of privacy? Of course not.
This is why we have metaphors. We use them as a cognative shortcut. We can't possible go through the world and understand everything about so in order to allow ourselves to have any opinion at all about most things we accept and utilize these metaphors. To most people (at least most people who read Slashdot and the New York Times) saying the phrase "Big Brother" is not simply referencing a metaphor. We instantly begin to reference everything we know about Big Brother, 1984, Winston Smith, George Orwell, fascism, totalitarianism, distopias and everything else. We combine it into a single phrase: "Big Brother" but it's really just a very large collections of concept from a fictional world that are combined with our experiences in the real world in order to make sense of everything.
Eh, whatever, I like metaphors.
--
RumorsDaily
Metaphors are extremely important in conveying information to non-lay people. But, metaphors are dangerous because if they aren't quite correct, misinterpretation will surely follow. The correct solution is advisors that can bridge the technology vs. policy and the techical nature of the data.
-Moondog
Don't get me wrong, I'm against a company disseminating my personal information when I explicitly prohibit them from doing so. However, all this talk of Big Brother and Joseph K. is a little too heavy on the melodrama and scare tactics.
Even if the U.S. government actively monitored every online activity that I take, they wouldn't be close to the vision portrayed by Orwell. And the path described by Kafka is not really privacy focused, its more a treatise on the effect of runaway bureaucracy and the impotence of the common man in face of the "grey wall" or government.
Privacy is important, but throwing out one doomday scenario after another won't lead to effective legislation that succesfully balances our current laws with our privacy rights.
I don't understand... when writing an article that contains metaphors how the writer(s) could possibly overlook throwing in a few similes as well. What next?!? Poems about technical issue? "Poems for nerds. Stuff that rhymes."
To all writers: Next time you're writing an article, don't forget alliteration and consonance!
How about "two legs bad, four legs good?" Oh wait, that's Orwellian again. I keep screwing this up.
Here's a novel idea -- how about we drop the slogans and the desperate scramble to make sure the 'people' understand. They will never understand. There will always be some people who just follow along with what's going on.
Issues like this should be dealt with by people that *understand* them. If we need to go scrambling around to find the best metaphor, then something is awry.
Everything above may well be poorly-thought out / spelled. Blame the beer, not me.
It doesn't matter whether we use Kafka
or Orwell to explain these issues to
the general public, when Joe Sixpack
hasn't read either of them.
I hope I'm wrong.
Privacy concerns, and governments addresses over these concerns, are like water and oil. Current events should point out the true factors when thinking about these two, although many never take the time to delve deeper into the situation, often overlooking many important factors that would normally be an outrage after the occurance, but seldom questioned until it is too late.
Politicians are often older people who will never utilize computers in the same fashions as us, and often do not understand what is going on. Law enforcement often uses scare tactics by injecting some outrageous scenarios into the minds of these politicians using cryptic terms themselves in hoping these politicians will pass these laws without incident, which will benefit law enforcement, and cripple the people.
Breakdown of questionable issues:
HR46 was an attempt to sneak a fast one.
Carnivore was used dozens of times and the FBI claims it was mostly on hackers. Note: Its been found that the Carnivore snoops everything on a segment what about your traffic? Were you on that network, was your traffic snooped?
makes me wonder...
FBI claims Castro is a hacker. In a country where they have close to nothing, do you really believe Cuba is a threat to the US, or is this just an attempt to step on Cuba when their down?
Bin Laden using technology to hide activities. Note: this isn't new news and judging from experiences in history, we've always needed an enemy for the sake of remaining a super power by enforcing authority. So if Osama is such a huge threat why isn't he stopped cold? Because the government can't or because they don't want to for the purpose of having an enemy?
Take a quick look at some of the stuff posted by Louis Tenet this week and do some rational thinking about how situations arise which can be handled by government, but are often purposely misconstrued for the sake of promoting other hidden agendas. Government will try to take as much privacy away as they can, any government so don't be fooled.
And it goes on and on with no end in site.
shhh... the world is out to get me
"When I was a Buddhist, it drove my parents and friends crazy, but when I am buddha, nobody is upset at all"
Isn't the issue of protecting personal data the same issue as protecting copyrighted data? Apart from the David and Goliath thing, which is purely perceptual, how are the two issues different? It seems a bit hypocritical to trade music on Napster and then get all bent out of shape about other people using cookies and web bugs. I'm not talking about legalities, I'm talking about the basic nature of both issues: somebody has some information they think should be under their control, and somebody else with a different opinion does something out of control with it.
It seems to me that legal and technical attempts to hide or protect personal data will run into the same problems as copyright protection. They just won't work. So can we just grow up and take the bitter with the sweet? Free music, free software and free information in general are great things. But if somebody else's information isn't sacred, why should mine be? I don't see why surfing the web should be any different from walking down the street in broad daylight. We're used to the idea that it's different, because we can do it in a dark room, seemingly away from prying eyes. But if that turns out not to be the case, well there goes the neighborhood, but that's just progress. Live with it and quit whining.
Both Kaplan's story and the law review article are well worth a read
Makes it sound like the DeCSS case...
---
Check in...OK! Check out...OK!
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
I put a lot of time into thinking about privacy. I started my own privacy group here in Ohio, dealing mostly with Social Security Number issues and driver's license privacy issues.
"Privacy" is deeply important to me...yet I admit that it's almost entirely a cultural concept. I was raised as an only child in the United States. I had my own room with a lock. In contrast, the Russian language doesn't even have a word for "privacy"--it's not a concept that exists (there have been linguistic studies of Russians that have moved to the United States, and then are able to kludge together Russian equivalents to English terms like privacy, personal space, et cetera. These emigres understand the concepts between themselves, but native Russians had difficulty getting them.)
At any rate, I have personally split "privacy" into three areas:
I use the generic word "privacy" to relate to what the author in this article uses the Big Brother metaphor for. Simply being watched. Dressing in private...using a bathroom with a locked door. Once again, the importance of this type of privacy is subjective. I have huge difficulty undressing unless I know the door is locked...yet there are individuals who have no problems undressing in front of others, within reason.
On a small tangent...this gets me to the idea of why privacy is indeed so subjective. For instance, I may be psychologically/emotionally hurt by knowing that someone was watching me undress. If that's the case, is my privacy invaded if there is a peeping tom watching me undress, but I don't actually know about it? Does a privacy invasion have to imply a consequence?
The second type of privacy I call "data privacy." It is information on the individual, how much is kept, who can look at it, where it is. Bringing up the idea of the consequence again, it is also subjective. I care who has my home phone number not just because I don't want to be bothered my phone calls (an actual consequence of a privacy invasion) but also because I just don't want my phone number sitting in computers everywhere (a much more psychological/sociological idea.)
The third type of privacy is possibly the most abstract...I call it "anonymity." It's often under the umbrella of privacy. We do in fact seek the ability to go out into public and be anonymous (hence why people became so cheesed off with what happened at the Super Bowl. Do you have a right to "privacy" in public...no...you can be videotaped. But the problem was in comparing you to a criminal mugshot database you lost a certain amount of anonymity.) I say (and this also appeared in the article) that a person is most human when they are anonymous. Consider how you are treated at Wal-Mart when you walk in. You could just be buying some toothpaste, or you could be buying a $5000 riding lawnmower. It doesn't matter, no one really knows. But consider the DMV. Not only do they not care if you actually get your license plates renewed, but they have a gigantic amount of information on you (who else wants to see your birth certificate?) You likely have no other relationship where you are so dehumanized.
I speak of these as three separate categories, but often they are combined, in particular anonymity and data privacy. Going back to driver's licenses, it is mostly a combination of data privacy and anonymity issues. For instance, the fact that most states used to be selling your driver's license data was a data privacy invasion, as is the fact that many states keep a digital copy of your photograph (I could argue that it is also a regular privacy issue if it gives me emotional distress knowing that BMV employees can look up my photograph whenver they want..and hell, I wouldn't put it past them.) Also notable is how the driver's license document itself (in its photographic form) is so dehumanizing. Living in America, almost everyone has a photographic license and therefore everyone has some sorta proof as to who they are. Loss of anonymity. My driver's license says I'm male. Does that mean I prefer watching football on the couch on sundays...or barefoot walks on the beach? Neither, in the eyes of the Ohio BMV, it simply means I have a penis and not a vagina. (Dehumanizing. I can't hide the fact that I am male...nor do I have any great interest to do so. People on the street can look at me and determine I'm male, and once they get to know me, they will get to know my personality and what that means in the context of me being male. The BMV simply knows that I have a penis, which I argue is completely unrelated to my ability to operate an automobile, and therefore "isn't their business.")
I wish I were going somewhere with all of this, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I'm still analyzing the article.
You go chat in shakespearewouldntuseapc.org and I'll go program my Palm virtual moron vudu doll.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
The media uses Big Brother as a metaphor because Joe Public recognizes the reference, period. Many (most) of the New York Times readers have not read 1984, and many probably do not even know where the reference comes from, but almost all will understand the reference to mean a watchful central authority. This may be in part to a moderately successful "reality TV" program we're all too familiar with, but regardless, it's effective.
If 95% of people understand the phrase "Big Brother tactics", and 1% appreciate the more profound "like K's trial", it's better to use the Orwell reference. It will have a more powerful effect, even if not quite as accurate.
Dear Carl S. Kaplan,
I read your Times article online. Thank you for taking the time
to bring to light Professor Solove's work. I look forward to his
final draft.
I am very concerned about privacy myself, not just online but
offline as well. Solove's conclusion calls for government
regulation to address our society's privacy concerns. I believe
the exact opposite would be more beneficial. If the federal,
state, and local governments would stop requiring me to use my
social security number for nearly everything I do, I feel I could
protect my privacy quite easily.
The government does not want privacy. How could they? True
privacy would mean not reporting my financial activities to the
IRS. True privacy would allow me to obtain a driver's license in
California without having to give a thumbprint. True privacy
would allow me to buy a firearm without a background check.
Why would the government want this? Privacy will only decrease
the amount of power and control they have in society.
Stuart Eichert
Stuart Eichert
So you're suggesting we only allow the highest quality people make decisions for all the rest? And what exactly are your criteria for joining this elite ruling class? IQ? Income level? Bloodline?
And if lawmakers are to come up with adequate responses to the lack of privacy online, they need to fully understand the nature of the beast. In short, if they read books, they should read more Kafka and less Orwell.
For some reason this makes me think of Chris Rock's intervention program. "I can read!".
Forget all the elitist comments about joe sixpack, we need to make sure that politicians can read. Or we could have Dubya toss my salad. I prefers syrup.
--
--
The government is not my daddy.
you touch on an interesting point in your post. one that is often overlooked.
the "scramble" you allude to is certainly an apropos one. And you are, in fact, right. Most people will never understand the tech of the net (or at least, not in our lifetimes). However, your idea that issues should be dealt with by people that understand them is sort of a problematic one.
The people the public see as understanding do, in fact, understand what is going on. This, unfortunately, does not necessarily assume that they hold the same values. Just start talking about whether napster is good or bad - you'll start a flamewar. What about encryption? More of the same.
In general, the people with controlling interests in big business, government, and what-have-you have long ago burned their "geek" clothes in favor of newer, more disinterested duds. A CTO or CIO cannot be expected to have the same tech values as their more involved counterparts. That is not to say that they don't "know their shit," but that they have long ago proven to their superiors that they, to be honest, simply don't care as much, or have the same belief system. Everyone is succeptable to those corruptions, even geeks.
I agree with you though, that the use of metaphor is a futile one. Perhaps i should put it this way: You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Enough[1] Footnotes[2] [1] Too Many [2] References given at the bottom of a page
--------------------------------- Born Again Bourne Again Believer: New Life, GNU/Linux Be Free!
Specifically the 1930s, and the rise of Fascism in Europe... Very much like the current Republican party...
Republicans are Nazis. LetsRiot!
I remember reading his 'The trial', and getting to the very end, and discovering that he requested all unfinished pieces of work be destroyed upon his death. 'The Trial' is an unfinished work. Boy did I feel dirty.
---
Desperation is a stinky cologne
Slightly OT: has anyone seen the movie Kafka?
Kafka was a brilliant sort of surrealistic film where Franz Kafka gets caught up in some bizarre themes taken from his own work. The brain-scope scene pops right into my mind. The "powers that be" build a huge lens so that they can look into the brain and figure out how people work. Kafka plays the role of physical hacker, literally breaking into the Castle through the file system and cracking the lens.
See it.
_____________
I'll bet / with my Net / I can get / those things yet.
_____________
I'll bet / with my Net / I can get / those things yet.
--Dr. Seuss
Why doesn't slashdot link in there... ??
nosig today
There are obviously some legal problems with forbidding web sites from collecting data that users voluntarily give them. Slashdot has my e-mail address, which I gave them voluntarily. The only difference between them and Amazon.com is that I personally consider Slashdot to be more trustworthy. I don't see how legislation could allow me to give my info to Slashdot, but protect me against Amazon's stated willingness to sell my information if they go bankrupt or are acquired. I just made a mistake by sharing my information with Amazon. I should have read their privacy policy and stayed away.
But leaving it up to personal choice isn't the whole solution. For instance, every supermarket in my area has a program where they keep track of what you buy. If you don't participate in the program, they charge you higher prices. Here there's a problem with lack of choice.
Another issue is that often you don't know what information is being collected about you. For example, there are the infamous "web bugs," invisible 1x1 images that tell somebody what pages you've been surfing or whether you opened their spam. This issue is exactly what The Trial is about. Again, there's no real choice for most people. I'm among the tiny percentage of the population that's sophisticated enough to turn off images and html in my e-mail program, but I haven't bothered looking into ways to avoid hitting web bugs inadvertently when I websurf. And most people simply don't have the time or expertise to keep up to date with how to protect themselves against this kind of stuff.
Legislation might be part of the solution. A more important part of the solution might be create an internet infrastructure that is technologically privacy-friendly. An example of this is the way browsers let you look at cookies and reject them if you want to; not a very successful example, but this is the kind of thing that needs to be worked on. Another thing is that there are still many web sites out there that ask for your personal information, but don't have any posted privacy policy -- we should all exert pressure on them to improve their practices.
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(Yet Another Catch-22)
Great. Now instead of getting legislators to understand privacy issues directly, we just need to get them to read. Seems that if more of them did the latter, the former would be less of a problem in the first place.
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Peace.
"Here's a novel idea -- how about we drop the slogans and the desperate scramble to make sure the 'people' understand. They will never understand. There will always be some people who just follow along with what's going on.
Issues like this should be dealt with by people that *understand* them."
That's the attitude the politicos and law enforcement agencies have! "Leave everything to us. We know what is best for you." They firmly believe they know what they are doing (and probably do 90% of the time).
*sheesh*
And the literary metaphors we choose to employ in debates "effect the way we see a problem and the way we solve a problem," he said.
The effect of the effect is affecting my affect.
My actions will effect change
My affect will be flat after I burn my brains on slashdot
Oracle and unix guy.
There is a fascinating article on the Register about how IBM helped out the Nazis during WWII. All of that data processing capability IBM sold to them allowed the Nazis to be far mor efficient in implementing their "final solution." Granted, it was "only" punch card technology, but it still helped them tremendously.
This is the marriage of bureaucracy and privacy concerns.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"