Snowden revelations one of many concerns
National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward Snowden made it back into international news headlines last weekend, following renewed accusations that he leaked U.S. intelligence in alliance with Russian spies. Simultaneously, President Barack Obama made a speech on NSA reforms that many are suggesting fell short of any real change to surveillance policies. The scandal, which emerged last year, sparked endless debates over what some saw as the right to protection, while Snowden supporters argued that the whistle-blower’s revelations uncovered a dramatic breach against the right to privacy.
Snowden delivered an alternative Christmas message to British audiences on Christmas day last year. He argued that the forms of surveillance and technology we have today surpass the simple microphones, TV screens and video cameras featured in George Orwell’s infamous vision of dystopia in “1984”.
He warned, “A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves […] Privacy allows us to determine who we are, and who we want to be.”
This got me thinking about the effect of technology on the everyday student. As an international student in a long-distance relationship my life would be drastically different without modern technology, as it has afforded me with many opportunities to contact home. The ability to get directions from my smartphone continually absolves my embarrassing map-reading skills, and the majority of my social life is organized through Facebook invitations and group messages.
But when I’m out for dinner with my friends and I look around only to see everyone’s foreheads because their gazes are transfixed on their smartphones, I can’t help but think that there’s an even darker side to the infringement of privacy that Snowden warned us against — a kind of intrusion that we bring upon ourselves.
When it comes to social networking and reliance upon technology, I’m certainly no saint. I Snapchat, I WhatsApp, I Facebook, I Tweet, I Instagram, I WordPress, I Skype, and so on. While many of these apps enhance different aspects of my social life, their handheld availability makes me part of a generation in which technological communication is replacing face-to-face engagement with the real world.
While it can be argued that social networking and technology make the world more connected, a case can also be made that they encourage social disconnectedness. We can access news updates, news feeds, tweets, gossip columns, selfies and personal messages instantly, but a reliance on these forms of communication can begin to replace affectionate intuition and our sense of ourselves.
There have been countless times that I’ve tried to avoid awkward situations by texting someone instead of actually speaking to them. Sometimes I find myself habitually scrolling through my Facebook and Twitter feeds for the third time in an hour just because I have nothing else to do. When I went home for Christmas, friends I hadn’t seen for months initiated conversation by saying things like, “I saw on Facebook that you’ve been having an amazing time.” Most of all, our generation is at risk of becoming forever associated with distractedness. My heart sinks when I’m speaking to someone else and they feel so compelled by the metal slab in their pocket, or so disinterested by what I’m saying that for the rest of the conversation all I get are nonchalant, intermittent, ‘yeahs’ and a couple of nods. Worst of all, I know that this is something I do myself.
The world may be becoming smaller, more accessible, and more instant, but it’s making us emotionally disconnected. We complain about the right to privacy but on another level, we encourage infiltration and allow technological communication to replace engagement with the real world. In Snowden’s words, technology is slowly becoming capable of defining ‘who we are, and who we want to be’.