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22 March 2009

Redrawing boundaries in the 21st century

There were a couple of interesting articles in the last week that highlight the way in which modern communication technologies dissolve socially and institutionally derived boundaries. One story, Growing Up on Facebook, which David Gibson alluded to, discusses how Facebook and related technologies dissolve temporal boundaries. In particular, the article discusses how in yesteryear (say 5 or more years ago) that the move from high school to college (and beyond) was an opportunity to rewrite ones identity. A relevant excerpt:

Six of my nieces will head off to college over the next several years. Some have been Facebooking since middle school. Even as they leave home, then, they will hang onto that "home" button. That's hard for me to imagine. As a survivor of the postage-stamp era, college was my big chance to doff the roles in my family and community that I had outgrown, to reinvent myself, to get busy with the embarrassing, exciting, muddy, wonderful work of creating an adult identity. Can you really do that with your 450 closest friends watching, all tweeting to affirm ad nauseam your present self?

A few days later there appeared in the NYT an article, As Jurors Turn to Web, Mistrials Are Popping Up:

Jurors are not supposed to seek information outside of the courtroom. They are required to reach a verdict based on only the facts the judge has decided are admissible, and they are not supposed to see evidence that has been excluded as prejudicial. But now, using their cellphones, they can look up the name of a defendant on the Web or examine an intersection using Google Maps, violating the legal system's complex rules of evidence. They can also tell their friends what is happening in the jury room, though they are supposed to keep their opinions and deliberations secret.

A juror on a lunch or bathroom break can find out many details about a case. Wikipedia can help explain the technology underlying a patent claim or medical condition, Google Maps can show how long it might take to drive from Point A to Point B, and news sites can write about a criminal defendant, his lawyers or expert witnesses.

These two stories highlight an issue that I have discussed on occasion from time to time in the blog--the rewriting of boundaries in our society, because of the advent of new technologies. The development and use of these technologies, of course, reflect the desire of people to communicate, to share, to gather information. The dissolution of these boundaries, intrinsically, is neither a good nor bad thing. And it's not a monotonic process, as technologies and institutions develop mechanisms to guard those boundaries. One can see that counter movement in everything from the development of devices that, with the push of a button, allow you to zap that loud cell phone conversation in the bus or train, to the efforts of China to control its Internet.

But these two examples reflect a cascade of (sometimes) unanticipated consequences of the advent of the Internet and associated ICTs. This includes everything from the emergence of Abu Ghraib as a story (fueled by photographs taken and sent by mobile phones), to sleep deprived teens e-mailing each other late at night, to the defeat of a sitting Senator because of a poorly chosen word that in another era would have just faded into the night. Arguably, none of these events would have occurred just a decade ago.

I am not sure what the broader narrative here is, or whether there is a broader narrative. However, what is clear is that there is a broad transformation of all of the basic building blocs of society. This blog offers examples from the family, the educational institutions, and the military. I can see when I ask my students to list who they have communicated with in the last 24 hours--for almost all of them the majority of the people they have communicated with is electronically mediated, and most had communicated internationally in that period of time. This would not have been the case when I started teaching at Harvard.

This is not to say that boundaries do not matter any more. People, collectively, are as adept at constructing boundaries as destroying them (as my recent posting on "long tables" versus "round tables" highlights). But it is clear that boundaries are vastly more malleable than they have been. And, these two examples highlight the ambiguous effects on the balance between individual autonomy and collective control-- the first case highlighting the tilt toward collective control (because it is increasingly difficult to compartmentalize ones life), and the second toward individual autonomy (because it is increasingly difficult to isolate individuals).

Posted by David Lazer at March 22, 2009 10:37 AM

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