Our society will learn to forgive youth-frozen-in-documentation. We will be more affirming of eccentric conduct and peculiar passions. Whereas candidate Clinton said that he didn’t inhale and he didn’t like it, Obama could say he inhaled often because that was the point. As our social mores relax to accommodate the radical honesty of blogs and the overshare impulse of Instagram, our aspiring candidates will be resilient to ad feminam attacks. This would be so precisely because we’d all be vulnerable to them, or at least familiar with them. (Few background checks are as rigorous as those for public servants, but the population at large will grow accustomed to informal and undisclosed reputation screenings in their personal and professional life.) (...)
Individuals whose life stories buck standard social scripts—immigrants, LGBT youth and ethnic minorities—are more aware of this than most. Members of these groups often navigate several social realms, swapping different speech patterns and modes of behavior depending on the context. As the much-missed Dave Chappelle once said, all black Americans are bilingual, equipped with one language for the street and another for the job interview. This ability to develop and express one’s dynamism, and to control one’s appearance based on a particular audience, is stifled by pervasive exposure.
In 2010, 28-year-old Krystal Ball ran for a seat in Congress to represent Virginia’s conservative 1st district. Pictures surfaced in early October of a younger Ball at a costume party with her then-husband. She was dressed in a Santa hat. Her ex’s makeshift costume consisted of fuzzy reindeer antlers and a red dildo for a nose (think: naughty Santa and Rudolph). Even though observers of Virginia politics identify Ball’s political inexperience as the campaign’s burden, as well as her running as a Democrat in a heavily Republican district, the photographs dominated the news. Ball responded swiftly:
The tactic of painting female politicians as whores and as sluts is nothing new, and painting successful women in general in this way in order to delegitimize them and to denigrate them is nothing new. It’s a new twist on it though because obviously now as I’m one of the first of my generation in the Facebook age to step up and run for office I’m sort of the first one to have this particular thing happen to me but I certainly don’t think I’ll be the last.Where many of us can see ourselves in those pictures of playful twentysomethings posing at a costume party, Ball’s political enemies attempted to rip her likeness from its context. They wanted Virginians in the 1st district to see her as an immoral and unserious ditz.
That many of this country’s lingering stereotypes play out on the political stage was not lost on Ball. In her responses during and since the campaign, she urges young women not to let this incident dissuade them from public service. But for every girl inspired by Ball’s pleas, how many more were discouraged by the whole episode? To argue that normalized exposure will endow our politics with greater forgiveness is to overlook how the identities of our society’s most vulnerable are mischaracterized, simplified and denied richness.
Witnessed in the abundance of cruel and negative advertisement during campaigns, and recounted to us in obnoxious detail in tell-alls like Confessions of a Political Hitman, opposition researchers and political adversaries will use any information they can find to convince voters to shun candidates. As Ball found out, the prevalence of social networks just means there is a larger ammunition cache.
Consider also this bizarre declaration from Facebook boy-king Mark Zuckerberg: “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end…Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” Or ponder this nugget from Google Executive Chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
In Schmidt and Zuckerberg’s vision, it would be inappropriate to account for Ball’s setting and circumstance. Last year, when two Texas undergraduates were outed to their unsympathetic parents through a Facebook privacy loophole, was that merely stark justice for their lack of integrity? The damage exacted by unwilling exposure will be unfair and uneven.
For young people interested in public service, it could be seen as best practice to simply stay off social networks. Keeping a low profile might shield their reputations from disrepute, against criticisms of the maximalist “let-it-all-hang-out” stance. But this too misses the point.
Not only does this mindset fail to acknowledge the entanglement of networked social platforms with face-to-face communication—as well as the ways ubiquitous surveillance captures information without one’s knowledge or consent—it also represents a perverse kind of incentivizing. Blogs, like older forms of publishing, encourage ideological experimentation. Subject-oriented networks, in the spirit of Twitter, traffic in the magnetism of shared interest. To discourage the use of these technologies could foster a political class that is calculating in character and predictable in policy. Hiding healthy duplicities or repressing radical dissent may encourage politically minded young people to be more like politicians.
by Hamza Shaban, TNI | Read more:
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