Opacity and Not Talking

We don’t tend to associate social media (or its study) with the term opacity. It tends to be words such as accessibility, transparency, and visibility that frame our understanding. The dark web is supposedly a foil precisely thanks to its murky impenetrability.

A number of scholars have begun to do the important work of picking apart the conceptual, legal, and political implications of this rhetorical framing. Examining talking interfaces tends to focus attention on what is represented, encoded, and visible. However, it is also important to reflect on what is not represented: what is opaque, unseen, inaccessible, and illegible. What doesn’t, or cannot, get expressed via digital talk interfaces? I reflect on these questions at length as part of an interdisciplinary project examining the narratability of consciousness (subject-constitution) and its relation to digital media.^1,2

In the context of Ego Media, discussion is limited (even a digital book needs some boundaries!) in various ways.

As mentioned in the Methodologies essay, there are topics and areas of social media that will remain opaque to researchers for reasons that span the spectrum of the mundane to the extraordinary.

Some of the data produced by Ego Media will remain inaccessible only to readers (rather than the researchers) – boxed up and locked away in a filing cabinet drawer or digital vault. There are data we will not share. This includes material withheld for ethical reasons – for example, the full transcripts of interviews with patients, which contain the sensitive data of individuals with stigmatized identities – as well as that withheld for legal or copyright reasons. (For more on this see: Methodologies, Interactions with Health-Related Information Online in People with Migraine and Epilepsy,³ and Life and War Writing, Off- and Online.)

For a literary scholar this is an unusual (if not completely unknown) experience: writing about text that other readers cannot access for themselves. Granted there are the occasional frustrations around publishing on material not in the public domain or decisions to be made around quoting from a scurrilous letter found in an archive. But for the most part we write on texts that our readers can access for themselves and draw their own conclusions about our characterizations and analysis of that text.

Here, however, we have black-boxed that text and hidden it from view (opacity has become a question both of access and legibility). On balance, we think for good reason. Yet such a turn to opacity has important implications: methodological and ethical certainly – we should perhaps be talking about an “ethics of opacity” – but also conceptual and on a much broader scale than the single text.

Where to now?

Chatbots

Literature, Talk, and Computing

Talking Interfaces