It Contaminates!
No written work on technological change will better prepare us for the future than Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves To Death. Coining the word ‘supraideology’, the book describes the entertainment dogma of the 1980s’ most pressing technology: television. To Postman, “no matter what is depicted or from what point of view, the overarching presumption [of television] is that it is there for our amusement and entertainment” (Postman 87).
As discussed in his novel, the rapid pace of television’s programming prohibits comprehension and limits intelligent discourse. Television’s video medium, in many ways inextricably linked to the field of broadcast journalism, possesses visuals disconnected from the audio that plays over them. These visuals carry their own ideas independent from the information conveyed by a reporter’s voice-over. Plus, the lack of context is worsened by other forms of distracting audio like music.
Even the concept of the time slot creates a demand for television content. Because television channels devote specific times for broadcasting, programming must be generated regardless of whether there is important information that needs sharing.
All of these characteristics give viewers the presumption that nothing on television is to be taken seriously, but should instead be given the same treatment as the device’s game shows and sitcoms. Social media, however, takes the drawbacks of television and greatly increases their severity.
Firstly, where a news segment may last several minutes before switching to the next story, the average video on TikTok or Instagram is likely just around thirty seconds. Viewers have even less of an opportunity to comprehend and think critically about each video before it finishes and repeats itself.
Secondly, videos on these apps share none of the exposition common to Postman’s beloved typographic mediums; the quick flick of a thumb across a screen puts the viewer in medias res. On social media, the idea that context must be provided isn’t upheld at the behest of journalistic convention as it is on news programming, but is wholly disregarded by the anarchic wild-west of internet conduct. There are no rules, unspoken or not, that say a video published to the internet must clarify where it exists in the larger context of the world or why it matters to the viewer. Not only that, but the accompanying trending sounds and voice-overs common to social media videos further distract from their already context-devoid messages.
Lastly, social media takes television’s concept of a time slot and breaks it. Now the ‘infinite scroll’ dominates, where video endlessly replaces video. No longer are there set hours of programming. Now, the never-ending feeds of social media create a never-ending demand for more content, even as the amount of information that actually needs sharing stays the same.
All this being said, however, it's not just social media’s entertainment supraideology that would terrify Postman. In his talk Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change, the author observed: “technological change is not additive; it is ecological''. When a technology has an impact on society, that impact spreads to the way we think about a whole host of other topics. In particular, social media has changed the expectations we have for all technologies that use the video medium, not just the internet.
For example, the smart-doorbell Ring, a live camera system that connects to the user’s phone, bridges a gap between the mediums of video and security technology. And because the technological change from television to social media is so far reaching, even surveillance is being designed to entertain a social media-oriented audience.
If you were to download the Ring app, you’d see that much of the homepage leads you away from your own security footage and towards a number of pages dedicated to other people’s videos. The Best of Ring section is one such page, and it boasts the description: “watch some of the most popular, funny, and heartwarming videos captured on Ring”.
Security footage, a tool whose existence goes back nearly a century, has suffered the diffusion of social media into the greater culture (or as Postman would put it, the greater ecology). And this diffusion doesn’t stop at mimicking social media’s language and appeal. Continue to flick your finger across the Ring app and you’ll see video after video in a classic infinite scroll feed— and of course there's the option to share your favorite!
But while these impacts of social media on the Ring doorbell may seem benign, they are already changing our relationship with surveillance technology. Just as television and social media create the expectation of entertainment and a demand for more video content, the social-mediafication of Ring creates the expectation of entertaining security footage, and a demand for more.
As surveillance video content becomes increasingly in-demand, generated, and shared, the more the lines between public and private life become blurred. What was once a safety measure for keeping track of personal property is now readily shared for the entire internet to see. This normalization of private life being exposed to the internet means a changing climate about what of our neighbors we have a right to see.
Furthermore, if our personal space and privacy no longer extends to videos of our property, then do we lose agency in where we appear online and how these videos are used? If we are constantly seeing personal security videos on Ring and other similar platforms, then our attitude will continue to shift towards finding these videos fair game for public distribution.
Already, the privacy component to Ring’s drawbacks has garnered serious discussion. Concerns over police access to Ring footage during investigations have caused the company to adopt policies in favor of protecting consumer privacy. But as exposure to security footage is increasingly normalized, accepted, and expected, perhaps similar policies won’t be passed in the future. The diffusion of Ring videos into the same public domain as social media may set a precedent for surveillance video acting more in the public sphere than the private.
So far though, privacy— even despite the “video technology to quasi social media pipeline"— has been in some ways upheld, in no small part to the people conscious of this technological shift. The ability to recognise social media’s impact potential negative repercussions on technologies like the Ring is how policies ensuring privacy will continue to be passed.
