SCREENSHOTS AND OUR SLOWLY ERODING PRIVATE SPHERE

For a glossary of terms used in this post, and a list of references for further reading, please see the footnotes to this post.

Character assassination, this dangerous new weapon they are calling Cancel Culture, has placed the keys to the public gallows in the mucky paws of the lunatics. The malicious are running free in the marketplace, in their posts, and in their private mailboxes. Anybody is fair game to the hunter, and the hunter is ignorant, greedy, and corrupt with his newfound power. The tired and desperate small-town loser, angling for the charitable favours of those within his diminishing circle, will plant suspicion on anyone he sees as a threat to potential popularity in the minds of his audience. He/she will further cast aspersions to the wind to fan small fires by penning florid and thinly disguised critiques of his competition, and then gloatingly sit watching the ensuing inferno until a reputation is in shreds and lines lie drawn in the wreckage of friendships. I have seen it happen.

The Dunning-Kruger brigade eat it up, and the rot spreads until an innocent person becomes a pariah socially, loses employment and is even driven to suicide – the current statistics for this are alarming. Terrifying power in the wrong hands; more insidious than any chemical gas conceived of even the most evil scientist’s imagination.

(Dunning-Kruger effect, in psychology, a cognitive bias whereby people with limited knowledge or competence in a given intellectual or social domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge or competence in that domain relative to objective criteria or to the performance of their peers or of people in general. [From Encyclopedia Britannica]) In other words: they are stupid because they don’t know they are stupid!

In grimy sweatpants, encrusted with the splattered residue of who knows how many nights of foray into the dim blue-light-district of cyberspace voyeuristic masturbation and rage, he taps his lubricated finger over his keyboard and spews his puke out onto the screens of the secretaries and housewives who hold him in the same high regard as they do their priest and family doctor. Tap tap tap; out flow utterances of viral vitriol. And there it is, irrefutable malice aforethought, deliberate injury: the Cyber Tort. And the perpetrators are increasingly being caught and prosecuted because of their abuse of the screenshot.

Sharing screenshots has become a normal part of our digital behavior. Once-private or semi-private messages make the rounds online, entertaining us and stirring up drama. When someone makes a claim and insists they have the receipts, they’re often screenshots—a series of Instagram DMs, text messages, private social media posts. There are entire online sub-communities dedicated to private dramas made public via screenshots; Facebook groups like “I am but a simple moth to a dumpster fire” and “that’s it, I’m wedding shaming” or subreddits like r/texts are built on screenshots of silly exchanges and ridiculous arguments.

The popularity of shared screenshots is a reflection of our slowly eroding private sphere.

Try as we might to maintain privacy in personal communications, what the recipients of our data and messages do with our information is largely out of our hands.[i] People spend much time and energy talking about their problems, fears, and secrets to friends. These self-revelations become ‘weapons’ of immense psychological damage when gossip and rumours are posted online to a worldwide audience. The tendency is for people, particularly when anonymous, to participate in spreading gossip and rumours further, making this a damaging form of cyberbullying.[ii] As I said in my previous post, if you shine your light, moths will come.

Until Queen Victoria instituted the Postal Reform Act of 1839, mail was a luxury affordable only by the rich, I discover. In “Benefits and Blessings, Letters Home, Friendship, Death Notices, Courtship, and Valentines by Penny Post” Catherine Golden demonstrates how cheap postage – which was quickly adopted in other countries – led to a postal “network” that can be viewed as a forerunner of computer-mediated communications. Indeed, the revolution in letter writing of the nineteenth century led to blackmail, frauds, unsolicited mass mailings, and junk mail-problems that remain with us today.[iii]

Victorian letter writing guides simultaneously advised writing with absolute feeling and being cautious about saying too much, or saying the wrong things, regardless of whether or not these wrong things had real feeling behind them. Many guides cautioned that anyone could read your letters and thereby make inferences about you, even if those who you corresponded with assured you that they burnt your epistles.[iv] Unfortunately, there’s no script for telling your friends and family that you’ve shared their info with an app, or that you’re allowing researchers to access your data. Until we develop social norms for this type of situation, there’s one feature that could help: screenshot notifications. At the very least, it’s high time to think about the screenshot as a privacy liability and consider limiting its power, through app settings and social acceptability.[v]

According to author Dyuty Auronee[vi], a self-confessed ‘occasional fusspot who loves her tea and authori-tea’, “If we are interacting with a person one-on-one, it means the message is directed towards them and sometimes ONLY them. If we were to share it with the world, we might have done it ourselves. While no one can set rules for you, you must use your better judgement to decide things for yourself. Even though something like this is well within cyber legality and actually quite harmless, it might not be ethically sound to do so. Belittle the consequences of a conversation screenshot sent to a third person today, and it can be damaging to your reputation as a trustworthy friend in the future.” She ends with the matter-of-fact warning:

“If you ever send the screenshot to the same person whose message you just screenshot, know that it’s karma. Good luck, mate.”

[i] https://slate.com/technology/2020/02/screenshots-text-conversations-privacy-social-media.html Retrieved 25 June 2030

[ii]https://www.academia.edu/11836687/Adult_to_Adult_Cyberbullying_An_Exploration_of_a_Dark_Side_of_the_Internet Retrieved 25 June 2030 Retrieved 25 June 2030

[iii] Golden, Catherine (2010). “Benefits and Blessings, Letters Home, Friendship, Death Notices, Courtship, and Valentines by Penny Post”. Posting it: the Victorian revolution in letter writing. University Press of Florida.

[iv] Frost, Annie S. Frost’s Original Letter Writer. New York: Dick and Fitzgerald, 1867.

[v] https://slate.com/technology/2020/02/screenshots-text-conversations-privacy-social-media.html Retrieved 25 June 2030

[vi] https://www.thedailystar.net/shout/the-ethics-behind-screenshots-1198681 Retrieved 25 June 2030

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