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rfmcdonaldI'll borrow shamelessly from Wikipedia to introduce the theme of this forum post.
My life is pretty much as transparent as glass. Almost as soon as I got Internet access in September of 1997, at home and at school, I began posting under my own name at the USENET alternate history discussion forum soc.history.what-if. I continued to be quite active on the Internet, not bothering to adopt a pseudonym. When I started this Livejournal in 2002, I continued this behaviour, judging that it was almost certainly too late. By the spring of 2009, any vestigial uncertainty on that has pretty much faded away.
This doesn't bother me overmuch. My thinking is that since I haven't done anything outrageous, never mind illegal, I've very little to fear from anyone trawling through the many many documents and links and personal statements that outline my life, in detail. Sometimes, I even joke that the gaze of the panopticon is warm and comforting, that it's really like that beautiful love song: "Every breath you take/ Every move you make/ Every bond you break/ Every step you take/ I'll be watching you."
Anyway. I think that I have a high tolerance level for this sort of thing, perhaps too high a tolerance level. What do you think about my attitude? What are your own attitudes?
Discuss, please.
The idea of the Panopticon originated with the English utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham as a prison design that would allow an observer to monitor all the prisoners at all times, without any prisoner being aware of whether he was being monitored or not. The French philosopher Michel Foucault later compared Bentham's ideas with modern society in his work Discipline and Punish. The Panopticon concept of continuous anonymous surveillance has been applied to the Internet as a metaphor for the online monitoring of Internet users’ activities and the collection of their personal data. Governments, corporations, criminals, and even regular citizens – in what is called the Participatory Panopticon – can contribute to the mass surveillance of Internet users.
My life is pretty much as transparent as glass. Almost as soon as I got Internet access in September of 1997, at home and at school, I began posting under my own name at the USENET alternate history discussion forum soc.history.what-if. I continued to be quite active on the Internet, not bothering to adopt a pseudonym. When I started this Livejournal in 2002, I continued this behaviour, judging that it was almost certainly too late. By the spring of 2009, any vestigial uncertainty on that has pretty much faded away.
This doesn't bother me overmuch. My thinking is that since I haven't done anything outrageous, never mind illegal, I've very little to fear from anyone trawling through the many many documents and links and personal statements that outline my life, in detail. Sometimes, I even joke that the gaze of the panopticon is warm and comforting, that it's really like that beautiful love song: "Every breath you take/ Every move you make/ Every bond you break/ Every step you take/ I'll be watching you."
Anyway. I think that I have a high tolerance level for this sort of thing, perhaps too high a tolerance level. What do you think about my attitude? What are your own attitudes?
Discuss, please.
