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."

Comments

The danger of metaphors

[PhatKat]

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

Re:The danger of metaphors

[pubudu]

One thing I noticed about both PhatKat and lance links's comments is that they question the use of metaphor in discussing politics. A good portion of Solove's paper was the use of metaphor in politics: precisely because you can influence the decisions people make by posing the question in a certain way, you must give extra consideration to which metaphor you use.

I don't think Solove was saying that Kafka presents a more accurate depiction of the problems regarding online privacy. Instead, the bulk of his paper suggests that the dehumanized and -izing collection of perfectly innocuous data, which is then acted upon in a dehumanized/-izing manner, is a greater threat than turning all of Batman's toys over to the government. Yet most lawmakers are concerned only with the latter; Solove suggests that they are concerned with this aspect only because they are fighting against Big Brother. Change the metaphor they think of and change the action you get from them.

Solove suggests using Kafka as a metaphor rather than Orwell. This is not because he thinks that Kafka has better descriptive power, that the internet can actually be summed up in that metaphor, but because he thinks he will get a certain reaction out of the various legislatures if the question is posed in these terms. Narrative as a tool to induce behavior, rather than as a method for gaining understanding. Basically, he's working from postmodernist assumptions regarding the place of metaphor in discourse, but his paper is not nearly as unintentionally (or perhaps intentionally) dada-esque in its prose style.

I like metaphors.

[DoorFrame]

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.

obscure

[stigmatic]

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