Thank you. Thank you, Janice, for the kind introduction, as is the usual case with such
introductions. I learned a lot about myself, so it was very useful. I'm actually really
thrilled to be here. I'm thrilled to be fulfilling my lifelong dream of living in Europe. I'm
living in England, so let's keep England in Europe for the time being. So today I'm going
to talk about the contribution that I think scholars in sociolinguistics and discourse
analysis can make to understanding issues related to surveillance, especially the kinds
of surveillance that have become embedded into our everyday uses of digital technologies.
What I'm going to try to convince you of is the fact that as sociolinguists and discourse
analysts, we cannot ignore the issue of surveillance if we want to have anything sensible to say
about the kinds of texts people are reading and writing nowadays. For nowadays, pretty
much every text we read and write and many of the utterances we speak and hear are somehow
affected by practices of surveillance. So I'll just start out by reminding you just
in case you've forgotten that you are being watched. You probably don't need me to tell
you this. You didn't even need Edward Snowden to tell you. It's increasingly obvious. You've
seen the cameras. There's probably one right up there. You've read the news reports about
government spying and you know enough about the internet to know that surveillance is
not just a residual activity of media companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon. It is their
primary business. And you probably know that when you're reviewing that restaurant or ordering
a taxi or sharing a picture of what you just ate or playing your favorite game like Angry
Birds or Bejeweled, those apps on your phone are busy collecting information about things
like your location and the people in your address book, which is then sold to data brokers
and then further down the line sold to advertisers and who knows who else. Now, you may go away
and do that because, well, Angry Birds, it's difficult to resist, isn't it? You might also
be aware that some of those apps even listen to you. Have you ever wondered why Google Maps wants
to access your microphone? Now, of course, if you ask them, they'll tell you that the real purpose
is to enable the app to play audio through your Bluetooth headphones and more. It's actually the
more that's got me worried. In fact, recently Google has revealed that it uses this function
to collect ambient noise from different locations to help them to gather more accurate information
about various places. You know, ambient noise like your voice. But as sociolinguists, I think we
shouldn't just be interested in the fact that Google and Angry Birds are actually doing this.
A more interesting thing is the fact that we let them. That we agree. In fact, most of the surveillance
that goes on is not some cloak and dagger stuff being done under the radar. Most of it, we have
some kind of hand in. So one of the things that I think is most interesting about surveillance from
a sociolinguistic perspective is the way that most surveillance is what conversation analysts call an
interactional accomplishment. The kind of joint negotiation between people and people and often
people and machines. As it is, it has actually become almost impossible to function in the world
today to have a social life, to get a job, even to get a taxi without engaging in such negotiations,
without being willing to open yourself up to constant surveillance, not just by governments
and companies, but by all of our friends and followers on social media. We have in fact become
increasingly preoccupied with watching each other and with being watched. Actually, the whole success
of the surveillance regime of both Facebook and the NSA is predicated on people not just being willing
objects of surveillance, but being active agents in it. Watching their friends, their relatives,
their students. Now, maybe on some level we want to be watched. After all, can you imagine what your
life would be like if nobody followed you on Twitter? It's even gotten to the point where we
have taken to watching ourselves. Take me for an example. Yesterday I gave a talk about data
sexuals. People who obsessively collect and share data about themselves using various apps and
devices. What I didn't mention in that talk is that I am one of them. I am a data sexual. Those of
you who saw me present at the last sociolinguistics symposium in Finland already know this about me,
that whenever I eat a meal, I enter all the detailed information about it into my phone,
and whenever I drink a glass of water, I enter that as well. I map my runs. I track my weight,
which if I want, I can automatically tweet to my followers on Twitter. And of course, when I do this,
I make some of the most intimate details of my daily life available to data brokers and advertisers.
But of course, health is not just about the body. So several times a day, I also record my mood,
and then I take a picture of my face to remember my mood. And so I have a running history of my mood
for the past three and a half years documenting all the highs and lows of my life as a kind of
permanent record for me and for whoever the company that owns this app wants to sell this
information to. But then I got frustrated. I felt like I was not collecting enough data,
especially these pictures, because what I was capturing was my mood, but I wasn't capturing
the world around me that was causing that mood. And so I bought one of these little life logging
cameras that you clip onto your lapel and takes pictures every 30 seconds. I'm actually wearing
it right now. Unfortunately, most of the pictures I've gotten have been of me entering data into my
mobile phone and taking selfies. Though I did manage to get some nice shots of my colleagues.
There's my former colleague Ryan with Harvey Sachs in the background. This is my colleague
Christoph. Some of you may know Christoph Hafner. He's not just a great linguist. He's also a licensed
solicitor. And I think he's preparing to take legal action against me for violating his privacy,
which begs the question, when does self surveillance spill over into other surveillance? Is it possible
for me to log my own life without also logging yours as well? In fact, I am doing this now. So
do be attentive during this talk, because you are literally under surveillance. So with this
combination of governments spying on us and companies watching our every move and our
smartphones and Facebook pages constantly gathering information about us, of our friends
and followers literally following us, of me taking surreptitious pictures of you at this
very moment, and even of you being carefully disciplined to spy on yourselves, nobody would
argue that we are not living in a surveillance society, or what Deleuze called a society of
control, a society in which mechanisms of surveillance are no longer located within
the discrete institutions like schools and factories and clinics, but pervade every aspect
of our lives. Societies in which we have somehow been led to believe that the only way to achieve
freedom is to submit to control. Of course, as linguists, we are no strangers to the surveillance
society. Some of us have had a hand in helping to set it up. We're the ones who teach the spies to
listen in whatever language they need to listen to. And some of us actually become spies ourselves.
The Linguistic Society of America points out that one cool thing you can do with a linguistics
degree is work for the government, listed right after work for an advertising company, which,
as should be clear by now, is pretty much the same thing when it comes to surveillance practices.
We're the ones who write the language tests, which all too often function, according to Alana
Shohami, as tools of surveillance and normalization. We're the ones who assist authorities in their
surveillance of borders, lending our forensic expertise to the evaluation of claims for refugee
status. And some of us are the ones who assist in writing the natural language processing algorithms
used to analyze both intelligence data and data on consumer behavior. But on a more fundamental
level, nearly all of the debates about surveillance tend to be preoccupied with the topics we as
linguists hold most dear, reading, writing, speaking, and listening. In fact, these are some of the key
words that crop up whenever people talk about surveillance in the media. What people are mostly
arguing about is what it means to read and what it means to listen. Are they reading our emails? Are
they listening to us? In the wake of the Snowden revelations, the NSA, for example, made the argument
that they're not really reading people's emails. They're just collecting what they call metadata.
So that's not really reading, is it? And they're not really listening to our phone conversations. Who
could possibly listen to all of those phone conversations? They're just monitoring them,
which is quite different, of course. It could be argued that even in the absence of all of this,
as sociolinguists, we cannot escape from the issue of surveillance. Sociologists and anthropologists
who've made indelible contributions to our field have told us that whether we like it or not,
surveillance is at the heart of all communication. Irving Goffman, for example, famously referred to
social interaction as a kind of information game in which players attempt to conceal information
about themselves while trying to find out information about other people. And back in 1951,
Jurgen Reusch and Gregory Bateson posited that the most basic foundation of communication is the
ability for two or more human beings to mutually monitor each other. Of course, the affordances of
digital technologies have changed dramatically with how, when, and with whom we can engage in
this mutual monitoring. They've brought the information game to a whole new level. And so
the question that I want to explore today is where do we start in devising a sociolinguistics
of surveillance? What kinds of things should we be paying attention to? And what kinds of tools do
we already have in our discourse analytical toolbox that we can apply to this new endeavor?
So I'd like to propose to start with what I think are three main aspects of language and
communication that have changed in the age of digital surveillance and what sociolinguists
and discourse analysts might contribute to understanding these changes. And these three
aspects are texts, pretexts, and contexts. And so let me begin with texts. Obviously, a lot has
changed when it comes to texts. It used to be that we were pretty secure in what a text was,
what it meant to read a text and to write a text. But many of the texts that we and our students
encounter today are challenging these traditional assumptions. Let's just take, for example, this
text. This is my amazon.com homepage. Now, my amazon.com homepage, as you know, is different from
your amazon.com homepage. Here, they've made some recommendations for me. Honor thy symbionts and
parasite wrecks, probably based on the fact that I recently bought a book called The Wild Life of
the Human Body. It's about all the parasites that live in and on your body. I'm really into that sort
of thing. They've also recommended some books on big data and a couple of books that would have
come in very handy for me preparing my talk today. They've also been kind enough to point out some
books that are related to books that I viewed, among which I am relieved to find is a book written by me.
They've also astutely remembered that I'm an adherent of the paleo diet. I only eat foods that
I can hunt and gather. And they've made some recommendations to support me in that endeavor.
Finally, they've thrown in a few more titles under the category new for me and also decided that I
could use a new pair of shoes. Now, I'm not entirely sure what the difference is between something
that's recommended, related, inspired by my browsing history and new for me. That is, I don't
really know the difference between the algorithms that have made these various choices for me, which
is part of the difficulty I have in reading this text. But in any case, I do find the recommendations
uncannily useful. I really could use a new pair of shoes. The really important questions about
this text, though, are not how accurate the recommendations are, but who exactly has written
it? Is it Amazon.com or is it me? And even more important, who is it that's doing the reading here?
It used to be that I could pick up a text and feel pretty secure in my identity as a reader,
but nowadays we're constantly encountering texts that read us back. So my Amazon.com page is reading
me, watching to see if I click on honor thy symbionts and ready, if I do, to recommend a
whole slew of new parasite related books. Texts then are no longer simply information delivery
devices. They are increasingly information gathering devices. Now, of course, there have
always been texts that gather information and these texts have always had an effect of
destabilizing our experience of agency when it comes to reading and writing.
In her study of people filling out census forms, for example, Susie Scollin talks about how agency
is distributed between the writer and the form. So on one hand, the person is filling out the form
and on the other hand, the form is filling out the person, deciding what kind of person that person
gets to be. But there are a couple of important differences here. First of all, the census form
doesn't change as I fill it out, adding new questions based on my answers. A large proportion
of the texts we and our students encounter nowadays operate in this kind of cybernetic
feedback loop that change according to how we respond to them. The second important difference
is that in the census form, the information gathering is quite explicit. It's right there
on the surface of the text. I know who's asking these questions and I know what they're asking.
For many of the texts we read nowadays, their information gathering function is hidden from
us, controlled by algorithms that are invisible to us. And when algorithms are involved, the whole
problem of agency changes entirely. It becomes much harder to pin down. So when we teach people
how to read, what we usually teach them is how to read the words on the page. And if we're
especially progressive, we might also talk about the pictures, call it multimodality.
What we don't teach them is how to read the algorithms underneath the text, which embody
meanings that are often much more consequential than the words in the pictures. We don't teach
them how reading is more and more about threading our way through scripts and protocols whose
contours are only vaguely visible to us and whose meanings can only often be gleaned
through inference. Algorithms don't just exert power over how we read. They also increasingly
determine what we read, acting as what Elay Pariser calls filter bubbles, virtual envelopes
that limit the kinds of texts that we get exposed to based on the kinds of texts we've been exposed
to in the past. I'm sure you already know that Google is a perfect example of a filter bubble.
So when different people type search terms into Google, Google returns different results based on
the information they've gathered about your past behavior. And so when you type in a word like
Victoria, maybe you get something about Queen Victoria as the first result. Yannis no doubt
would get Victoria Beckham. Kiwis among us would probably get Victoria University in Wellington.
I get Victoria's secret. I don't know why. But more importantly I can't really challenge
the algorithm's decision to serve me up women's lingerie. I can't even read the algorithm. It's
Google's secret, part of their intellectual property. As much as algorithms are changing
what it means to read, they're also changing what it means to write. As Frederick Kittler puts it,
we do not write anymore. Instead we interact with texts and tools that read and write themselves.
And because of this we've lost full control or even knowledge of what our writing does.
Nowadays writing has become increasingly automatic. Just choosing something from a
drop down menu has become an act of writing, producing a text. When I go running with my
Nike Plus app, I produce a text. And when I use my credit card to buy women's lingerie,
I'm producing a text. Even just being present in a particular place has become an act of writing.
Now often, despite this automaticity, we are quite conscious and deliberate in these acts of writing.
I always make it a point, for example, when eating out, not to check in at the noodle shop
where I'm eating, but to choose the most expensive restaurant nearby. Don't you do that?
Maybe not. New media scholars like Dana Boyd have pointed out that many young people are experts
in this kind of deliberative identity performance that's carried out, not through words,
but through mediated gestures. Jim Gee has referred to them as shape-shifting portfolio
people. And they'd better be, because these portfolios are often used as a means
to judge them later on. A recent survey revealed that 91% of recruiters check the social media
pages of potential employees. And the things they pay attention to include pictures of drinking,
drug use, profanity, and interestingly, grammar. Tell that to your students. But more worrying is
how these incidental texts we produce through our everyday actions are re-semiotized and
recontextualized by algorithms converted into data dossiers that are bought and sold
by data brokers and advertisers and end up serving as markers for access to resources,
services, and power in ways which we're usually not aware of. More importantly, the ways these
texts get written doesn't just depend on our own iterative, incremental writing of the self,
but also on the texts and behaviors aggregated from all of the other people associated with us.
When data mining services use data to construct a portrait of you, everything that anyone else
in your social network also does concerns you, implicates you, might influence how you will end
up being contextualized. The problem is we can never be entirely sure how the machine is reading
us, because the algorithms that they use to form their inference based on our behavior are hidden.
Over the years, of course, discourse analysts have developed a number of tools
for figuring out how people form inferences about hidden meanings, and many of these tools
form the basis of the field of linguistics known as pragmatics. What we might call an analog
pragmatics is based on the ideas of Paul Grice, who came up with what might be thought of as an
algorithm called the cooperative principle for figuring out what people mean when they don't
say what they mean. The idea is that most communication follows certain rules of relevance,
brevity, clarity, etc. And when these rules are flouted, it triggers in listeners an algorithmic
process of searching for alternative meanings. In digital pragmatics, however, we would need to
have something different. We might need to have something like an uncooperative principle, an
assumption that algorithms embedded in these texts we're reading are not necessarily trying
to cooperate with us, or even to communicate with us. After all, you are not really their reader,
you are their text. Like classical pragmatics, a digital pragmatics needs to start by examining the
everyday strategies people have for making inferences about their online interactions.
Despite the apparent opacity of algorithms, humans nevertheless continue to actively form
inferences about the protocols that lurk beneath the digital texts, and often they adjust their
online and offline actions and utterances based on how they think the algorithms of Facebook or
Google might interpret and contextualize them. My students, for example, have all sorts of tricks
about tweaking Facebook's status updates so that they appear at the top of the news feeds of
certain friends. They're actively involved in trying to figure out the algorithm, and as they
perfect such practices, they build new sets of assumptions and inferences and inferential
processes that may be different from those they've developed for communicating with humans. Often the
inferences and the ways you respond to them are motivated by strategies of impression management,
strategies designed to portray ourselves as certain kinds of friends or certain kinds of
students or certain kinds of employees or certain kinds of customers. I have a student in Hong Kong
who told me she doesn't really like indie music. She likes canto pop, popular Cantonese music,
but she knows that to be perceived as cool in her group of friends, she really should like indie
music. So whenever she leaves the house, she turns on Spotify on her computer to play an indie
playlist so that the program will alert her friends that she's listening to this really cool music when
she's actually listening to canto pop. It will also make recommendations to her based on the songs
she's played of new indie groups which she can then name drop whenever she's talking to her friends.
So one of the interesting things about digital surveillance is not just that it's made listening
to a song, a kind of speech act with a kind of performative force, but that it has also created
opportunities for all sorts of new identity performances that people carry out by manipulating
algorithms. While sometimes these performances are motivated by a desire to perform in a particular
way for those who are watching you, other strategies are motivated by the desire to resist
surveillance, to confuse those who are watching us. One way this can be done is by using
technical solutions like the website letsconfusegoogle.com which allows readers to create
a fake person and randomly generate search queries based on that identity. But the most
common strategies for resisting surveillance are not technical, but discursive. People using their
own abilities to create subtext to confuse unwelcome eavesdroppers. Dana Boyd has extensively
documented these practices among teenagers. She calls it social steganography, hiding information
in plain sight. One example of this kind of practice is subtweeting, using the very public
platform of Twitter as a medium of engaging in private conversations. This is my 17-year-old
niece Emily engaging in this practice. I've followed Emily on Twitter for years and I don't
think I've ever understood a single tweet that she's posted. Now in many ways these are fairly
sophisticated discursive practices involving not just trading in inside jokes, but often crafting
messages so that they have different meanings for different potential audiences, and exercise in
audience segregation done entirely with discourse. And digital pragmatic pragmatics would also like
classical pragmatics try to look at the linguistic strategies of speakers or in this case algorithms,
how they do it, how they in Austin's phrase do things with words, and especially how they get us
to do things like disclose personal information to them by making us think that we're actually doing
something else. Which brings me to the second aspect of language in the age of digital surveillance
that I think sociolinguists have something to say about, what I call pre-texts. By which I mean the
ways that texts and their authors create social situations around communication which encourage
or discourage certain kinds of behavior. After all, most of the information companies and
governments know about it has not been taken surreptitiously. We have given it up of our own
accord. And so what are the linguistic practices that contribute to us willingly offering ourselves
up as objects of surveillance? For social engineers, pre-texting is the practice of
creating an invented scenario, the pretext, to engage a targeted victim in a way that increases
the chances the victim will do things that they would not normally do. For linguists, the idea
of the pretext is much broader than that. In fact, pretexts are necessary conditions for all
communications. Sets of expectations, text producers, and text consumers bring to their interaction.
As the applied linguist Henry Whitterson puts it, all texts are designed to be understood pre-textually.
It is the pre-textual purpose that we bring to texts that controls how we engage in them
and regulates the focus of our attention. Jan Blomart puts it more simply, pre-text are the ways
in which discursive environments create conditions of sayability. Blomart's concern when he uses the
word in the context of immigration interviews is with how pretexts constrain speech. My concern
is more with how pretexts compel speech and other forms of disclosure. One way texts get us to engage
in certain kinds of activities is by priming or activating certain pre-textual expectations.
A good or maybe not so good example of this is those emails you get from time to time that start
greetings to you my friend. Ever get those emails? Although I dare say few of us have been taken in
by these. They are much more effective than you think. Blomart and Amani did a study of these
emails and he found that they operate through two basic mechanisms of pre-texting. Framing,
invoking a credible activity for people to engage in a storyline with characters and values they can
recognize, and positioning, creating credible identities for their authors through the use of
particular linguistic registers, particular generic conventions. Now they don't always succeed
in reproducing these frames and registers effectively which is why many of them fail.
Other popular email scams using similar techniques however are much more successful. Not just because
they present more credible markers of identity through things like logos and typographic style,
but also because they invoke pretexts that are less dramatic, that involve more mundane
everyday activities like updating your personal information or confirming a recent order. Of
course many of the companies we all know and love use similar techniques of framing and positioning
to create pretexts for users to give them more information. Often they frame information giving
as some other kind of activity such as playing a game or seeking entertainment, learning, socializing
what has become known as sharing and even as politics or social activism and they position
themselves as people who are helping you to do these things or more often than not retreating
into the background and making you think that the people you are sharing this information with
is not them but your friends, people you know who have been similarly lured into giving their
information. Yesterday Anna asked me about how much people actually use these sex traffic tracking
apps that I was talking about and I said that as with most self-tracking apps people often
download them and they use them once or twice and they get bored with them and they forget about
them but from the point of view of the designers of these apps it really doesn't matter because
once you downloaded the app onto your phone they already have access to data like your address
book and your GPS data which they can sell to advertisers they don't really care about your sex
life that is just a pretext they care about your data. Once again let me use myself as an example
now I've never fallen for a Nigerian email scam but I did give up my DNA to a California-based
company called 23andMe which provides direct to consumer genetic tests but whose real business
is collecting large amounts of bio data about people which they can then sell to pharmaceutical
companies and research laboratories. Now the main pretext that they used to lure me into giving them
my DNA was the promise that they would use it to provide vital information to me about my risk
of developing a range of deadly diseases which is of course quite into that sort of thing
and positioning me as kind of a pre-symptomatic patient which of course I find quite attractive.
But just getting my genetic information is not enough yet to make this information valuable they
need to match it with information about my phenotype such as my appearance, my preferences,
my habitual behaviors, the diseases and medical conditions I've had and this medical pretext also
serves as a good way to get me to give up this information so they're constantly sending me
emails asking me to take these little quizzes to give them more information about myself. Now
many of you might have heard that recently this company 23andMe was prohibited by the U.S. Food
and Drug Administration from marketing their product for health purposes and so they're no
longer able to use this pretext but it's not the same as shutting 23andMe and as 23andMe down
as was portrayed by many journalists because 23andMe was never in the business of giving
health advice in the first place that was just a pretext for their real business which is
information gathering. So when the FDA shut down that pretext they just formulated a new pretext
helping people to find out about their ancestry. They still try to extract the same information
from customers that now in the context of helping them to find out whether they're Native American
or African American or related to royalty or something like that rather than whether they're
going to get cancer. I don't much mind it really you know it's been a lot of fun playing around
with my genome learning about all the possible causes of my future death but it is well to keep
in mind that the cost is a lot more than the advertised $99. I've also paid with my information
the more I know about my DNA the more 23andMe knows about me fair enough after all I did agree
to the terms and conditions. Did you ever do that? Agree to the terms and conditions? It seems that
software manufacturers and website owners are constantly asking us to agree to stuff yeah to
give permission to them to do stuff which is often quite vague like view basic information
about my account or view the list of people in my Google Plus circles. Why do they want to view
this stuff? What do you want to do with it? You don't just view something yeah you have to have
some kind of purpose in mind right but this is conveniently left out of the request and and what
do they mean by basic information anyway? Some companies use the same kind of clever
pretexting that I mentioned before to make their terms and conditions seem nicer. Facebook for
example has recently renamed their terms and conditions now they're called rights and
responsibilities. That sounds much nicer doesn't it but whatever they're called most of us are
likely to agree to them without reading them. Some understanding of how they get us to do this
can come from what we know in sociolinguistics about the mechanics of conversational sequencing.
How in interactions the way we interpret and respond to a move has to do with the where the
move is placed in a sequence of moves. So there are basically two ways terms and conditions are
usually presented to us. This one pictured here is called a click wrap. It's when a box pops up in
the middle of some process and you're asked to agree to something so that you can proceed with
the process. Click wraps are perfectly designed to get us to immediately agree because what we
are most intensely focused on is getting on with the process that has already started. So with
software it usually goes something like this we spend five minutes or so downloading the program
we start to install it sometimes being asked a number of questions to customize the program
and then right in the middle of the installation they ask us to agree to the terms and conditions.
Usually the the request for agreement is actually covering up the terms of condition conditions so
we can actually read them. So they ask us to agree and in order to to be able to go on and use it
we immediately we immediately agree. My colleague Ron Scowen called this principle
the funnel of commitment. The idea that the deeper you get into a process or a conversation
the harder it becomes to back out. Just imagine what it would be like if they asked us to read
and agree to the terms and conditions before downloading the program and installing it and
customizing and using it. This would dramatically alter the conversational context in which the
request for agreement is made. But the second way terms and conditions are presented is even more
insidious. It's called browser wrap. With this method you're simply informed that using the
program or entering a website constitutes agreement. Just being there becomes an indirect speech act
but usually you have to interrupt but usually you have to interrupt the process that is click
on this separate link to find out exactly what you've agreed to. One popular technique for browser
wrap permissions is to replace the agree button with a button that says something like visit
website and then informing you in much smaller font that by visiting the website you are agreeing to
give this company your basic information your profile information your birthday information
your education history your location and work history your friends profile information their
birthdays education histories location and work histories and that you are giving the app permission
to post messages on your behalf. That's what visit website means. What happens when these sorts of
information gathering pretexts start to filter into the physical world. Well it's already
happening. This is a sign on the door of Phil's coffee shop in San Francisco and informs you
that by entering the coffee shop you are agreeing to let the owners detect the presence of your
smartphone and to view your basic information profile birthday etc. The problem of course is
not just the technological sensors and transmitters that are rapidly populating the environments in
which we live but also the visible but no less insidious layers of social and discursive context
laid atop these technological infrastructures. The complex web of pretexts and permissions and
social norms that are developing around practices of watching and being watched which brings me to
the final aspect of language and communication that sociolinguists need to pay attention to
in a surveillance society which is context. As any good linguist knows communication is all about
context. Dale Himes told us a long time ago it's not enough to be competent in the grammar and
lexus of a language to be communicatively competent one must know what to say to whom when where and
how. For Himes context included not just the material context of environments and technologies
but also socially constructed contexts social roles relationships norms of interaction and speech
genres. This is the most important thing about context that contexts of communication are not
just constructed by technologies they're also constructed by us through the social norms that
we develop through using these technologies. The philosopher Helen Nissenbaum argues that privacy
is all about context rather than a one size fits all abstract concept of privacy privacy actually
has different meanings and different functions in different situations. Privacy is not about keeping
your information a secret or preventing strangers from taking your photograph or refusing to agree
to the terms and conditions of angry birds. Privacy is about protecting what Nissenbaum calls the
contextual integrity of situations. The notion of contextual integrity helps to explain why as
Dana Boyd points out teenagers object when their parents look at their Facebook pages even when
those pages are open to the public. When adults think about privacy or private places Boyd explains
they often imagine the home as a private space yet for many teenagers the home is about the least
private place they can think of and so they escape into the privacy of public spaces like
shopping malls and social networking sites and so your mother looking at your Facebook page is not
much different from her stalking you in the shopping mall they're both public. The biggest
challenge introduced by digital technologies is that they have the tendency to to blur lines
between different contexts allowing us to simultaneously work and socialize study and
play angry birds. This doesn't necessarily destroy or even compromise contextual integrity
it just makes it more complicated more fluid something that we have to renegotiate and redefine
as we go along and as we go along other people and institutions try to define it for us often
taking advantage of these blurry lines and trying to convince us that the rules that work in one
context work just as well in another context and so this is what Google tried to do in a recent
motion to dismiss a class action suit brought by a group of people who didn't like the fact that
Google was reading their emails in order to serve them up advertising. Google argued that them
reading your email is the same as a business person's secretary opening his mail. Really?
Does anybody here think that sending an email to a friend is just like sending a letter to a business
associate or that Google has is the same as your secretary? It's hard to protect contextual
integrity with laws and contracts since every context is different and so we depend on social
norms to police contextual integrity. At the same time social norms don't just come out of nowhere
they develop in response to the architectures of our technologies. When people objected a couple
of years ago to Facebook changing its privacy policies so that all users names and profile
pictures genders current cities networks of friends and friend lists on all the pages they
subscribe to are searchable by anyone on the web. Mark Zuckerberg informed us that privacy
is no longer a social norm. People have just gotten more comfortable sharing more information
more comfortably with more people. At least Zuckerberg has gotten more comfortable with that
since it makes Facebook a more efficient information gathering and distribution device.
This explanation of course ignores the powerful position of Facebook in creating the architecture
in which these social norms evolve and not all young people agree with Zuckerberg. The teens in
Dana Boyd's research for example continually insist that they want privacy. They just don't
depend on Facebook's privacy settings to give it to them and they develop more local innovative
ways like subtweeting or restoring to apps like Snapchat which promise to permanently erase
messages from a receiver's device 10 seconds after they open them or when these apps don't live up
to their promises migrating to other apps like Wicker. The real debate about surveillance is not
about information it's about how we define context and how through our discourse and our actions we
continually redefine it and contest the definitions that other people try to impose on us. It happens
on the local level of teenagers trying to carve out privacy for themselves in public spaces and
it happens on the level of the larger information ecosystem in which my data and your data
circulate through a vast system of economic exchange which is invisible to most people as
invisible as the algorithms that choose my recommendations on amazon.com. A system whose
ultimate outcome is what David Leon's calls social sorting. Social sorting is not just about putting
different advertisements on your Facebook page and my Facebook page it's about deciding who gets
access to different kinds of social and material resources to mobility and to power. So to end I
want to spend just a few minutes talking about the impact of a socio-linguistics of surveillance
on how we might teach our students because I'm not just interested in discourse analysis I'm
also interested in literacy and in particular digital literacies how digital technologies are
changing the way we teach our students to read and write. Now what I mean by digital literacies is of
course it's more than just about reading and writing it's about helping our students to uncover
the underlying processes and protocols and algorithms that go into producing the texts
that they read and shaping the conversations that they have helping them to become better
players of the information game by becoming familiar with the kinds of pre-texts individuals
and institutions used to get information from them and learning how to exercise agency and where
when and how they wish to be visible and audible to others and in defining these contexts in which
their communication takes place rather than having the contexts defined for them.
Duke English professor Kathy Davidson argues that for kids to succeed in the future schools need to
add a fourth R to the three that they're already teaching. They should have reading, writing,
arithmetic and algorithms. So does that mean we should start teaching our students programming?
Well it wouldn't hurt you know discourse analysts now are so into multimodality but the one mode
they have yet to engage with that has really become the most important mode is the mode of code.
But before we start teaching C++ and Python in our academic writing classes or introduction
to linguistics we might consider what tools we already have as linguists and and literacy
educators that can at least offer a way into interrogating algorithms in ways that are similar
to interrogating analog texts. On the most basic level we can get our students to start thinking
about three things that are part of all texts whether they be sonnets or social networking
sites which I call preferences, protocols and default settings. What I mean by preferences
are those sets of choices that different kinds of technologies of contextualization give us
for expressing certain meanings like for example the way the choice is in the relationship setting
in Facebook enables certain kinds of meanings and constrain other kinds of meanings or things like
the application forms that write us as we write them or the ways that all genres through forms
and conventions constrain what we can say and how we can say it. By protocols I mean something rather
different from what Galloway means when he talks about machine protocols. I'm more interested in
human protocols constructed by discourse, the activities or pre-textual expectations
that texts channelists into like the status update in Facebook that invites you to write
what's on your mind and add a picture so that updating your status has become a recognizable
social practice. How do these protocols make some activities normal and natural and marginalize
other activities? And finally by default settings what I really mean are the production formats
and participation frameworks that come as the default choices in many reading and writing
platforms like the default settings on Facebook that make your information available to everybody.
So how are these settings biased towards certain kinds of social relationships and certain kinds
of social organization? All texts come with different kinds of default settings regarding
the way they should be read and which enable and constrain different kinds of participation. And
of course we can always change those default settings but it takes effort and whenever we do
we're always sending some kind of message creating implicature or risking being challenged.
The issue of default settings for participation and production that come with different kinds of
technologies and how much we're able to change those default settings is terribly important
because it's ultimately about what kind of social context we're able to create. It's ultimately about
inclusion and exclusion. It's ultimately about what kind of societies we're able to create,
what kind of relationships we're able to create. Now it would be great if we could manage to produce
students who are computer hackers. People with the nonce to mess with those algorithms from the inside
but at least we can endeavor to produce language hackers. Students who are not just competent
language users but who are able to get inside a piece of discourse to see how it works and to
make the hidden processes and exercises of power in it a little more legible and to be able to
figure out new and creative ways to use the tools of text production available to them in ways that
fit their purposes rather than just fitting Mark Zuckerberg's purposes. Of course they can choose
to opt out of social media but there are social costs to that and even if we are able to get off
the grid others will continue to chat about us and to produce texts that come to represent our
lives in the world. Even if we're logged off we in some ways remain part of the social media ecosystem.
So I'm not so interested in getting our students to run away from the prying eyes of algorithms.
I'm more interested in them learning how to pry back. That is learning how to bring about
social change through their discursive practices. To quote from Donna Haraway, engaging with the
agency of technology is no longer optional. It's a non-optional constitution of objects of knowledge
in operation. It's not about having an implant. It's not about liking it. It's not some kind of
blissed out techno bunny joy in information. It is a statement we had better get. This is a
worlding operation. Never the only worlding operation going on but the one we had better inhabit
as more than just a victim. Most talk about privacy. Frames it as protecting our identities
which usually means leaving fewer traces or covering our tracks. But leaving traces is not
always a bad thing. Leaving marks is part of making an identity. More important is to gain
enough control over these traces so you can make an identity that's worth protecting. Thank you.