Skilful Honesty
We constantly leak data. With every reward card, mobile phone, credit card, facebook entry, blog, tweet. With every stroke of the keyboard, we perforate our lives with self tagging. We dribble and we gush. We flood the data-sphere with our information incontinence.
Before, there was ‘word of mouth’. If we wanted to know something about a potential employee, a possible girlfriend/boyfriend, a new neighbour, recent foe, we’d talk to our friends and colleagues. Now there is just ‘word’. Or to be more precise, ‘words’. A constant torrent of words amalgamating into information. It’s no longer good to talk, now its better to Google. We follow our quarry’s information trail (whilst leaving our own), building a picture of them by joining the dots of data.
Does this Google profiling lead to a truthful portrait of the mined individual? Is it more or less reliable than non-digital gossip? We are able to manipulate our online presence, but we are also open to manipulation. Whereas word of mouth will fade as the conversationalists interest/memory diminishes, digitised words are always retrievable. Word of mouth is public, localised, finite and predicated on being part of your quarry’s network, however tenuously. Cyber-stalking is (seemingly) covert, global, instant, infinite and the net knows something about everyone.
We are well versed in the notion of the unreliable author. We understand the pitfalls of open source information. But technology is science and in science we trust, science is truth. We know that electronic media can present a science fiction, but we want to believe in the truth of the written word.
The internet has given rise to the unreliable reader. The opportunity of reordering the word wrests the reader from the margins of the text. We no longer passively ingest words. We ‘wiki’ as we read. We are veracious. We sit at our computers, the bulimia of our five second attention span sucks up text, flicking from link to link, gorging on a mish-mash of information that we regurgitate as knowledge.
Artful Manipulation
Email correspondence offers both distance and intimacy. It offers a sense of control – the opportunity to have your words delivered directly, without interruption and on record. It is also a fictional space, only existing through the act of writing and reading. It seems private, yet can easily become very public. What it lacks in the romance of pen on paper, it makes up with its instant urgency.
‘Skilful honesty’, is an unsettling phrase. The notion of being skilled at honesty suggests duplicity. How skilled was the honesty during this project?
The responsibility of using the first person singular has, on the most part, been avoided. I hid behind a legitimate organisation. I hid behind other people, faking email addresses and using their names in the correspondence. I hid behind technology. I researched each of my readers, building a Google version of them. Indirectly, I invited them to do the same, to research who they thought I was, as I researched who I thought they were. I, I, I. Why attach ‘I’ to it now? Ego? I needed the readers to correspond with me in order to activate this project. I now need them to read this in order to continue the dialogue. I am being more honest. Am I?