By Vienna Strub
Everyone feels safer when they’re anonymous, right? Stuck securely behind a username and a password containing at least one capital letter and one number, anyone can be whoever they want to be on the internet. Although you as a person may think you’re morally in check, it’s been proven that when a crowd is granted total anonymity they as a group can do terrible things. A good example of this is Derren Brown’s ‘The Experiment’*. When subjects were given the choice between making or ruining a seemingly random person’s night, they continuously chose the option to make the night worse. They assumed that their actions had no consequences and eventually, they chose for the person to be kidnapped. The ‘random person’, who was secretly an actor, then ran into a street and was ‘hit by a car’. This broke the fourth wall for the audience and left them all horrified. The man wasn’t injured and the entire thing was staged, but the theory about mob mentality was proven: when given anonymity, if one’s peers are making bad choices, one is more likely to blindly follow, even if the choices are obviously (and morally) wrong.
So how does this experiment relate to our use of social media? Cyberbullying has been prominent since the dawn of the internet, and it has become more and more normalized in recent years, with young teens and adults alike expecting hate on a daily basis. People think that their actions on platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter have no real-world repercussions due to a sort of ‘mask’ that they provide. Apps like Instagram and Snapchat may not always have your best interests at heart though, because in September of this year, the Facebook company was being sued for allegedly accessing Instagram user’s cameras and microphones** to give them more targeted advertisements. There are over 1 billion people who make use of the app, so you could easily see how shocked they were when this news came to light. Sadly, there are plenty more apps that do the same thing, only this time we’ve blindly allowed it. You know those terms and conditions you get? Companies like Apple can access all your information completely legally, such as your emails, passwords, and even the sad rants you write in your Notes app at three o’clock in the morning.
This further proves that privacy and anonymity are a social construct to make us feel safe. In reality, even if you don’t have any social media, your phone is quite literally a tracking device that could be accessed by anyone. Still don’t believe me? Fine. Let’s take it further and say you don’t use forms of modern electronics, like mobile phones, laptops, tablets, or anything of the sort. Now take a walk down a shopping district street. I can safely bet my college fund that almost all of those stores have a camera that just watched you, and who knows who might be behind the screen it links up to? In case someone broke into any one of those shops they would have stored footage that the owners can give to law enforcement. These cameras aren’t what you envisioned from crime shows though. They’re often high definition and can see every part of your face clearly. The question here is, could you get in trouble with the law for a small crime due to this constant surveillance?
It’s obvious that all people act differently when no one’s around, but would you be more law-abiding if you knew that you were constantly being surveilled, but not by who? An English philosopher, by the name of Jeremy Bentham, came up with a structure for a prison called the Panopticon, where the prison was built in a circle and there was one guard in a tower in the center of the prison. The theory was that the prisoners, who could not see the guard, would still follow the rules of the prison, as not to lose privileges, because it was assumed that they were being surveilled. In a way, our current world is like a Panopticon, with corporations like Facebook in the centre, and all of us as prisoners around it. Do you still feel anonymous?
Overall, modern surveillance is rarely policed and affects everyone. So before you rant about the Covid-19 vaccine injecting a small tracking chip into your body and breaking your precious wall of anonymity, you might want to take a good look at your iPhone; it might just be looking at you too.