For most of the semester, I have typically argued that society’s constantly improving ability to monitor and record data about our daily actions would be beneficial, provided that the information would be more or less equally accessible to everyone. For example, if car insurance companies had perfect information available to them to evaluate how risky drivers are to insure, they could naturally develop a socially optimal pricing structure (in addition to creating incentives for people to be safer drivers). However, what I read from pages 101-205 in the Circle began to make me question that assumption.
If we view the Circle as a closed network in which everyone who works for the Circle has more or less perfect access to their electronic information about one another, we begin to see some of the potential problems that could arise in this society with perfect access to information. One of the biggest problems that arises in this scenario is the fact that the can be large transaction costs associated with collecting the information. If the opportunity cost of Mae filling out various social media profiles (the revenue she could have generated for the company if she had been working in Customer Experience for the time it took her to fill out the profile) exceeds the “Community Value” that The Circle gets from having this additional information, then obtaining this information was not efficient for the company.
In addition to this, The Circle also creates an adverse incentive for people to use social media to inefficient levels. The Circle may value the data it obtains very highly, but if the data was created for the sake of creating data (for example, people trying to climb up the popularity rankings), there is no guarantee that the data is accurate and/or useful. For example, when Mae is doing her best to race to the top of the popularity rankings, the book mentions that she commented 33 times on a single page. From the context given, it seems fairly safe to assume that her comments were made solely for boosting her ranking, and not because they reflected her actual opinions. Therefore, returning to the issues of transaction costs that perfect dataveillance could potentially incur, it seems as though The Circle would have been better off if Mae had been working in Customer Experience than commenting on that random page. The value of these comments ties back in to our previous discussions about what types of communication are considered “good” communication.
One of the best examples of this in The Circle is the concept of “Zinging” someone. When someone receives 10 “Great Job” Zings for completing a relatively menial task, it’s ultimately a waste of time from the people who sent the Zings. This wasted time is ultimately the largest cost that was created when The Circle implemented the popularity rankings.
The common theme that ties the past three paragraphs together is that perfect dataveillance is inefficient, because the additional benefit of having access to 100% of information instead of 99.9% is relatively small, but the costs of obtaining that extra 0.1% is relatively high. While this does not entirely refute the position that I initially believed, that perfect dataveillance is not detrimental to society provided that is it not applied asymmetrically, it definitely reinforces the fact that we should not attempt to achieve perfect dataveillance purely for the sake of perfect dataveillance.