Have you ever heard of the twenty-first century ghost? You have definitely seen it and heard it. It hides in many places, but its favourite spot is in the pocket of your trousers, next to you on the table or in the palm of your hand. The ghost of the twenty-first century lives in the interactive rectangle that is your smart phone. This ‘digital urn’, as described by Kirsty Logan in the podcast series A History of Ghosts, is filled with your voice, your face, your ideas, your questions, your life. Every day we work on growing our own twenty-first century ghost by feeding it incredibly personal information and preserving it in our digital urn. But our twenty-first century ghosts’ range is not limited to our smart phones, they spread across the world, roaming around social media servers and traveling in the inboxes of other people’s digital devices. The average person has no control over what can be found in their digital urns, what past lives the ghost can expose and havoc it can cause.
Some people have a different type of ghost, one that is a little more timid and introverted. If you have ever taken part in an oral history project you probably have such a ghost; a recording of your life’s story told by you living in an archive staying put until someone calls on it. In order to put an oral history interview into an archive and create an archival ghost, one has to fill in what seems endless ethical approvals, consent forms and permission slips. These documents are there to highlight the potential “dangers” of having something in an archive: how you privacy might be violated or how someone could misuse your testament and twist your words. Social media sites do a similar thing, only they condense the stacks of paper into one tick box. Clearly the archiving process is more transparent in comparison to the methods use by those in the Silicone Valley, which at best are questionable and at worst violate basic human rights, however transparency does have its drawbacks.
The reaction people have to this transparency is similar to that when you ask some people to travel by air. People are terrified of flying because they are fully aware of how wrong it can go, but statistically it is a lot safer than walking to the corner shop. Just like the designing an aeroplane, archiving an oral history has to follow certain rules from the start, because those involved, aerospace engineers and oral historians, are fully aware of the chaos and pain it could cause if the systems fail. Having these restrictions is seen as more ethical, but it also inadvertently puts disproportionate emphasis on the dangers of archiving (and flying). In opposition, walking, like the ticking of the terms and conditions box, is easier and it delivers blissful ignorance to the high probability of being hit by a car or having one’s data stolen. Unlike the oral historians and archivists, the developers of the uncomplicated tick box view their users as nothing more than data sets and potential profit. Some could say that this has led them to be dismissive of a human’s right to privacy and be vague when it comes to revealing the true cost of using one of their platforms. However it seems that by not drawing attention to terms and conditions, people have become very happy to hand over their personal information.
The existence of these two ghosts, the restricted and timid archival ghost, and the free and uncontrollable twenty-first century ghost, makes the people’s relationship to their privacy seem incredibly distorted and ill-informed. It seems odd to trap the archival ghost with paperwork in order to protect their corresponding human, when that exact human is completely content with sharing every single part of their lives with strangers on the internet. However, it is this sharing that is key to success of social media. By giving up their privacy the users of social media are granted access to a huge network of listeners and viewers. After all a story is not a story if there is no one to listen to it. By the same logic if the oral history is never reused, the archival ghost is never called upon and the story is never listened to, its very existence becomes void. So this raises the question: should we even bother archiving oral histories in the first place if the paperwork blocks it off from listeners? For the sake of my research we’ll say yes, in which case let’s follow it up with the question: should we be more like Silicone Valley and be a little less pedantic when it comes ethics?
For now I am going to go with yes and no. The current process around ethical archiving does need updating but because I also fundamentally believe that Silicone Valley is wrong and I think people are starting to catch on. People are becoming increasingly aware of what their twenty-first century ghost might expose. For example, a growing number of people are being ‘cancelled’ because the public have dug through their digital urn and found a tweet they sent when they were twelve and used a term that is now considered very derogatory. There is also a generation of people, who are unhappy with their parents relentless ‘sharenting’. Sharenting is the practice of posting everything your child does online, which results in the child having a data presence before they can even speak and therefore give consent to its existence. This faint atmosphere of mindfulness around posting, uploading and sending is descending over the digital world. People are reflecting on the ghosts they have created and are now trying to do damage control.
Currently the archival ghost and the twenty-first century ghost are two extremes on the scale of privacy and its corresponding ethics. However, the increased awareness around the rabidness of the twenty-first century ghost is pushing it along the scale in the direction of the archival ghost. I believe it is now the turn the archival ghost to make a similar move towards the centre. There needs to be more innovation when it comes to the ethics of archiving because at present it is stopping people listening back and that is truly a shame. People bond over sharing stories, they create communities around the most random of things and social media proves this. However social media also showcases perfectly the consequences of condensing very complicated ethics into one tick box for the sake of ease. Changes need to be made on both sides of the scale. By observing the current situation on each side, investigating the pitfalls, challenges and opportunities, and reviewing how different people in the respective fields are attempting to solve these problems, we can start seeking an equilibrium and find a balance between private and public. This managing of our ghosts is a strange and distorted process that is only in its infancy, but hopefully by the end we will be able to free the locked up archival ghost and calm the twenty-first century ghost.
