Are We Trapped?

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During our class discussion and activities, we payed particular attention to a simple phrase from our reading, “From Big Brother to the Electronic Panopticon” by George Lyon. This phrase was “made visibility a trap” (Lyon, 66). As the various groups dissected this phrase to modernize the meaning, many themes came up throughout our various re-wording of this phrase. The general meanings of these re-wordings were along the lines of  “Invisibility is impossible” or ” Digital convenience/efficiency takes away privacy”.

Although these ideas resonated with me, during our discussion the word “traceable” kept popping into my head as an over-arching theme or problem with constant dataveillance. Although this word can be closely tied and related to visibility, I believe that there are differences between the meanings and implications of these words. Although it is true that with the technological age almost everything we do can be visible to a government, website, or company, it is the implications of this visibility that make it a trap. This visibility leads to a vast amount of information about ourselves being able to be traced  by virtually anyone. From every google search, credit card purchase, magazine subscription, or song downloaded; technological advances make these everyday activities traceable to people who wish to seek this information. As someone in class said, this can be seen as a positive to gain information on people to gauge their loyalty or potential, I personally view this as an unnerving reality. People can gain absurd amounts of insight on virtually anyone, and the intentions of this curiosity can be for be both positive or negative reasons. The idea that people can trace such vast amounts of information about a persons life leads me to believe that visibility is a trap because it leads to the traceability of a personal information.