[Air-l] RE:ethics of recording publicly observed interactions

Carol Perryman cp1757 at hotmail.com
Tue May 11 16:04:27 PDT 2004


>They must assume that their communication is being observed by other people 
>who may comment about it, record it, analyse it etc - and if they do not 
>wish for this to occur the solution is very simple, dont make such 
>utterances publicly.

>Life is a pretty simple business when we sweep away the bulldust, why must 
>we complicate it ?

Thanks for your comments, Eero.  But how is it simple, when the minute we 
begin to look at the record of even a single human interaction in any form, 
we are made aware of all the weight of history and custom, the constructs of 
shared meaning, the potential clashes between private definitions on the 
part of any two people - even if they live in the same town?  My grandfather 
had a different sense of civility than my own, my colleague from Korea, yet 
another.  I'd say it's simple only when viewed from a great distance.  I'd 
add to that the reality of technological mechanisms for observation and 
capture constitutes so large and rapid an alteration of our interactions 
that we're all learning as we go about its impact in every part of our 
society.  We shape and reshape our civility, and ethics rise from that 
creation. One hundred years ago you might not have been subjected to 
another's private conversation on the bus, because you might not have had 
access to such public transportation.

If, legally, we should learn to be aware that our privacy is no longer a 
reasonable expectation, as it once was, how does that affect us - not only 
our practices, but our expectations of dignity?  And can't we differentiate 
between 3 things (there may be more, I don't know yet): expectation, ethical 
behavior, and law?  The law may sternly claim that each individual carries a 
responsibility for whatever utterances or behavior he or she enacts, but the 
individual may blithely proceed with whatever their inclinations might be, 
feeling (the foolish thing!) safe among a like-minded society.


Carol Perryman
Graduate School of Library & Information Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
cp1757 at hotmail.com

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