If ever there were a place to celebrate counterculture and off-limits literature, it would be a college library. On Thursday, Sept. 19, such a celebration occurred in USF St. Petersburg’s Nelson Poynter Memorial Library, where students and professors commemorated Banned Books Week with a panel discussion on censorship and surveillance in modern culture.
USFSP professors Bob Dardenne and Thomas Smith, experts in journalism and political science respectively, spoke about the role surveillance plays in daily life. They discussed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the future of journalism and, inevitably, the Internet.
“We routinely give away our information,” Dardenne said, referring to Facebook’s diverting, attention-grabbing lure as an octopus.
“We’re in a culture that as a [whole has] different ideas of what privacy is,” he said. “Privacy to you is a different idea than my idea of privacy.”
“We’re easily distracted,” Smith said.
“If you look at what people are Googling in Russia, it’s not human rights, gay rights. It’s trivial things.”
He explained how our own diversions influence how much we’re willing to compromise our right to privacy, creating a concept of relative privacy in turn.
“It used to be the spy and trenchcoat, but now you just download [someone’s] friends on Facebook,” Smith said. “We have to grapple with this notion of if you live in a surveilled society, if there’s even a possibility, does it change what you do online, who you friend on Facebook?”
Our willingness to document and digitalize has also rocked the roots of traditional journalism.
“How do you define a journalist now?” Dardenne asked.
“Digital technology changed everything, or allowed us to change everything. [The journalism world] hasn’t recovered, and it may not recover. Maybe journalism as we know it disappears, and we are now our own journalists,” he said.
Self-documentation seems to be more popular than ever, with outlets like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and various blogs all feeding the frenzy. So, does something like censorship even exist anymore?
“The only way to [solely] self-censor these days is to lock yourself in your room,” Dardenne said, jokingly.
While Smith admits he does not have a Facebook profile, he isn’t sure that living without the World Wide Web would be ideal.
“Your life would be awful dull,” he said. “You couldn’t live without email.”
Fully unplugging from the Internet may prove to be impossible, especially since it has become a necessary means for communication in common culture.
Still, there must be balance. “You can embrace much of what the Internet offers but still maintain privacy in the midst of it,” Dardenne said. And if all else fails, he said, “We need to use the technology we have to create a press that writes for us.”
