Thoughts

This category identifies postings that are philosophical in nature.

Fact, Character, and Family Narrative

/ Christopher Parsons / 2 Comments

I’d be lying if I said that ‘knew’ Lloyd Parsons, my grandfather who recent passed away, in the sense that ‘to know’ is typically identified. I don’t know the date that he was born, though I could get the information rapidly. I don’t know about all of his travels, or his adventures, or the trials and tribulations that he went though, though I could get that information if I so desired. I don’t know the people that he knows (by and large), nor do I know the relationships that he formed and had disintegrate around him. Given time, effort, and dedication I think I could find out a considerable amount of information on these subjects. In short, I don’t know many of the facts of his life – I lack a comprehensive (or even loosely rigorous) awareness of his life.

What I do ‘know’, or remember, is his smile, laugh, and the twinkle in his eyes. I remember the characteristics that, as a grandson, I saw. I don’t know what attitude or personage that he conveyed to his business partners. I recall the kindness that he displayed towards grandma, and the frank love that he expressed through his advice and reminiscing with his children. I remember elements of grandpa’s character, not the empirical facts that surrounded that character.

It’s as I think of what it means to identify who grandpa was, in tandem with some recent readings in memory and identity as well as work in family narrative theory, that I wonder who’s role he was filling in in the drama that is the Parsons family, and who will later assume that role. Who has been told throughout their life that they are like grandpa? Who manifests his attributes? While we’re typically inclined to thinking of the next of kin (i.e. which of the sons is most like grandpa), systemic family theorists would argue that we need to look at least one generation away from the grandparents – we need to turn to the grandchildren or great grandchildren, and consider who amongst them have been/are being groomed for the role that grandpa held. This shouldn’t be taken to mean that male grandchild X will become an engineer, but that there are traits that have been impressed into the narrative role held by grandpa – who will adopt them? Who will facilitate (and create) the network of relationships born from key characters of his personality?

Systems theorists often point to cases where parents say ‘you’re just like X’ (with X representing grandpa in this case) or ‘why do you have to be like X’ to their children. This parental process of informing a child of who their identity belong to has core formative effects. It creates a space within which the child is permitted to act out (even is the acting out is negative) because it is predicated on already existing habits and behaviours – the actions and characters of the child already have a ‘customary’ place in the family narrative. In asserting that a child is like a particular other family member, that isn’t to say that the child will assume the entirety of that previous role (they will have their own particularities and empirical experiences) but that they take on the characteristics the deceased family member was ‘responsible’ for ‘holding’. What is most important, in all of this, is to look beyond the surface characteristics – who holds a similar job, who has a similar physique – and consider what made that person who they really were.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have the chance to get to know the facts of grandpa’s life. I do know the character of how he presented himself to me and, perhaps selfishly, am comforted by the fact that there is a good chance that I’ll get to see those core characteristics, enmeshed in a unique body with a unique set of particularities, sometime in the future. While Lloyd Parsons will never be born again, we will see core facets of what it was to be Lloyd Parsons again, and that kind of circularity brings me a strange kind of comfort.

Shield the Sources, Shield the Telecoms

/ Christopher Parsons

The past couple of days have been interesting, to say the least, when looking at recent shifts and decisions in American legislatures. Specifically, the House is looking to shield bloggers from federal investigations by providing them with the same protections as reporters, and that after the telecommunication companies that ‘theoretically’ (read: actually) cooperated with NSA spying activities have refused to cooperate with Congressional investigations that they have been let off the hook. Let’s get into it.

Federal Journalists and Professional Bloggers Shielded

The US has had a long history of journalistic freedoms, but in the face of recent technological advances they have refused to extend those freedoms to users of new journalistic mediums. Bloggers, in particular, are becoming a more and more important source of information in the US – some dedicate their lives to blogging and use it for professional gain. Until recently they have (typically) been refused the same status as traditional journalists, which has made it risky for bloggers to refuse to disclose their sources if hauled into courts of law.

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Piracy, Privacy, and Big Brother

/ Christopher Parsons

As an initial aside: Linux betas really are betas, nothing like the relatively polished (in comparison) betas that Redmond released.

Piracy or ‘Avast Me Mateys!’

I don’t spend a lot of time talking about software or music piracy, largely because I think that there are alternate sources that more effectively aggregate and deliver news about it. That said, I couldn’t resist commenting on Jennifer Pariser’s (head of litigation for Sony BMG) statements surrounding digital technologies. When under oath, Pariser responded to Richard Gabriel’s (the lead counsel for record labels) question of whether it was wrong for consumers to make copies of music they have purchased, stating,

When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.” Making “a copy” of a purchased song is just “a nice way of saying ‘steals just one copy’ (source).

Her comments directly point to why fair use is under such duress. More importantly, however, even when we apply the principle of charity to her general position, her comments seem to defy the public’s position on the matter. I don’t want to suggest that because people generally believe something that the law should reflect their beliefs – if that was the case then racial segregation would be more prominent than it is – but that when extensive public discourse has been undertaken and a common position is held by the deliberative participants, that their shared consensus should operate as the basis for developing legitimated law. I think that this discourse has, and continues to, occur in North America.

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Who the Hell is Digital Privacy About?!?

/ Christopher Parsons

This may sound absurd to some of you that either speak with me on a regular basis, or that have been reading this blog or others that I frequent on a regular basis: I sometimes struggle to offer a concise, clear, sound answer to this post’s topic.

I don’t necessarily see this as a failure, but (perhaps as a self-defence mechanism) more as proof that I need to work on condensing my ideas into ‘bite-sized’ fragments that I can then build the big picture from. I know, it sounds silly easy but I often have problems condensing problems to make them immediately approachable to other. So, you ask me, why do I persistently worry about privacy in the digital space? Common reasons why individuals aren’t concerned with their privacy follow (in no particular order, and not a comprehensive list):

  1. If it means that business can make things cheaper than me, then who cares?
  2. If it means that my children are safer, or that criminals are more effectively prosecuted, then who cares?
  3. As long as it doesn’t interfere with my daily life, then who cares?
  4. If I have nothing to hide, then what do I care?
  5. If it safeguards me from terrorism, then who cares?
  6. If it only affects people in other nations, then who cares (more of an American position, but it’s important to deal with)?

I can’t spend too much time on these, but I want to address most of them, in part so that I can steal from this post in the coming weeks.

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Global Privacy and the Particular Body Politic

/ Christopher Parsons

Different countries have different privacy laws, and different attitudes towards what should be counted as private information. As Peter Fleischer rightly notes, this often means that citizens of various nation-states are often confused about their digital privacy protections – in part because of the influx of foreign culture (and the presumed privacy standards in those media) – and consequently are unaware of their nation’s privacy resources, or lack thereof.

Google Corporation has recently begun to suggest that a global data protection system has to be implemented. In his private blog (which isn’t necessarily associated with his work with Google) Fleischer notes that,

…citizens lose out because they are unsure about what rights they have given the patchwork of competing regimes, and the cost of compliance for businesses risks chilling economic activity. Governments often struggle to find any clear internationally recognised standards on which to build their privacy legislation.

…

The ultimate goal should be to create minimum standards of privacy protection that meet the expectations and demands of consumers, businesses and governments. Such standards should be relevant today yet flexible enough to meet the needs of an ever changing world. Such standards must also respect the value of privacy as an innate dimension of the individual . . . we should work together to devise a set of standards that reflects the needs of a truly globalised world. That gives each citizen certainty about the rules affecting their data, and the ability to manage their privacy according to their needs. That gives businesses the ability to work within one framework rather than dozens. And that gives governments clear direction about internationally recognised standards, and how they should be applied. (Source)

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So…You Want to Redefine ‘Privacy’, eh?

/ Christopher Parsons

There has been a sustained argument across the ‘net and in traditional circles, that privacy is being redefined before our very eyes. Oftentimes, we see how a word transforms by studying its etymology – this is helpful in understanding the basis of the words that we utter. What do we do, however, when we work to redefine not just a word’s definition (such as what the term ‘cool’ refers to) but its normative horizons?

In redefining the work ‘privacy’ to account for how people are empirically protecting their privacy, are we redefining the word, or the normative horizon that it captures? Moreover, can we genuinely assume that the term’s normative guide is changing simply because of recent rapid changes in technology increase the difficulty in exercising our right to privacy in digitized environments? To argue that these normative boundaries are shifting largely because of how digital networks have been programmed presupposes that the networks cannot be designed in any other way, that digital content will flow as it does now the same way that gravity acts on our physical bodies as it presently does. The difficulty in maintaining such an analogy is that it assumes that there are natural laws to an immanent programming languages that structure how we can participate in digital environments.

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