Info mining

A month or so ago I became a cyber recluse, that is, I deactivated my Facebook account. I had done it once before and had been thinking about it for some time. Aspies are supposed to love socialising on-line, and in some ways I do. I would not have spent half the time talking to my latest ex (a mistake from the beginning) if I had not been able to do it on-line. This illustrates one of the dangers that I came to see all too starkly: the illusion of being sociable. I may not be the most sociable person that’s ever lived. I may prefer to get out and do something - to get down the driving range with a friend and work on my golf swing (which is abysmal), to cook for somebody, to get out on my bike and get some exercise – but all of these things, though neurotypicals may go about them differently, and enjoy chatting for its own sake, are sociable activities, even if I do them only once a month, or less frequently. On-line I was being sociable, and yet not. But also, Facebook, I found to lead to the same paranoia as I get in large groups in the real social world.

I am impulsive. I will post some idiot status update, and then worry about what people think of it. Indeed, sometimes, they will make that perfectly clear. I come over wrong through Facebook, as I do, often, in real life situations in which I’m not comfortable. I felt myself getting sniped. An old friend, who, if it were not for Facebook, I wouldn’t still be in contact with, because we have so little in common, reacted to one of my posts – some dumb comment to a friend who had asked something about the zeitgeist in my home town to the effect that it wouldn’t know a zeitgeist if it hit it in the face and that I felt like walking around the neighbourhood in a raincoat flashing my weltanschauung at all and sundry –  by saying, drily, sarcastically, there was an excess of Weltschmerz in my town. I worried over it for days. Why do I have to come over as such a cock? The guy hates me! He always did. And he has reason. What an asshole! I went to his wedding and didn’t bring a present, slept in a tent that time around for the most expensive wedding, in a Cambridge college, that I have ever seen, and I didn’t bring a present. I went over and over it, reproaching myself, and making some stab at defending myself, that with things how they were with my ex, I literally had no money and no time to organise such things. But it happened all the time. People sniping, maybe. And certainly, with words written down with no sense of irony or sarcasm, with nothing to go on, they worked their way into my head like shrapnel. And me, all the time, making the kind of gauche idiot pronouncements that I hate about myself, and about me in combination with any form of instant communication: e-mail, SMS, blogs, it’s all put me in horrible, horrible, situations before.

People from work were continually making points by deleting me as a friend, and then reinstating me, as if I were just on the cusp of being an acceptable individual. And then there was the difficulty with peripheral people. I am not somebody who likes to have a great number of mates. I have a small number of friends. And constantly there is the dilemma of who ought to be in that circle as far as Facebook goes. I feel out of control. Out of control too with the whole “in a relationship”, “not in a relationship with” thing. I met a girl, the latest ex, Marketa, in Prague, where I got together with her on the last night. I come home. Soon enough she puts up In a relationship. And then, taking her lead, as I too often unthinkingly do from others who have that neurotypical authority, I do the same. Friends start talking, of course. Everybody sees it.

I’m out with a friend of mine, Benton, one day, and he asks about it. What’s this about you being in a relationship. Yeah, well, I met somebody, I say, in this sheepish tone I have had about it since I came back from Prague that should let me know that I’m doing something stupid that I should be out of. Well, she put up her status to in a relationship, I say. And what, you felt obliged? I think about it. Maybe I did. It’s one of those times I go from feeling so neurotypical to seeing the things I get wrong so plainly. Did I feel obliged? It wasn’t a conversation we had. We kissed on a balcony. I came home. It fulfilled some dream she had had for years. And I should have known better. Only I didn’t. But Facebook was the conduit of this very public fuck up. And then there was the way I felt pressure to have our pictures together. And then tried to moderate it by pasting a photo of Cavin from Calvin and Hobbes over my picture. Ughhhh!

And it’s not true either that aspies must necessarily feel comfortable on the web. I become hypersensitive, and paranoid. I know it. I post something, and, wherever is the dialogue, the thread goes on around me, ignoring my post, just like it would in a pub. That, or people snipe. Again, some are intended to put me in my place because I come over so badly, whilst others may be innocuous comments I interpret the wrong way because I don’t know how to do otherwise, and because of my social paranoia that extends to the cyber-sphere.

But there is a wider difficulty with social networking that applies not only to those aspies who, like me, do not necessarily fall into the stereotype. This has been widely discussed, for example, in this video, which may now be outdated in some areas (and which, for me, has the most irritating first sentence since Martin Amis’s Night Train). There are various conceptions of the “Facebook is evil” school of thought which parallel in many ways the various strands of the 9/11 truth movement, ranging from ‘Facebook was invented by the CIA for optimum data mining, social prediction and control’, which seems to reverberate with the the ‘made it happen on purpose’ school of thought on 9/11, to the ‘Facebook leads to decommunilisation and the erosion of privacy’ perspective, which does not necessitate the same level of intentionality, taking in the usual corporate media take on identity theft paedophilia yada yada (I’m not dismissing this as a danger, it’s just that I know you’ve heard it so many times before that it becomes one more tocsin in an ongoing corporate camponological chorus, a psychic tinnitus that echoes around us every day). Essentially, we give away our information, increasingly communicate through computers in traceable, poolable, analysable ways, sign up to on-line political groups, and contribute to a dream resource for advertisers and pollsters and anybody else who would wish to analyse trends and groups.

I clicked onto Mindhacks today and saw an post that linked to a Boston Globe article that discusses an MIT experiment that demonstrates how this can work. By analysing friends within Social Networking groups, the researchers were able to predict, with a high degree of accuracy, whether an individual was gay or straight. To my mind, this is only the tip of the iceberg and the dangers of information mining on Facebook, with the information people routinely now give about themselves, enables profilers to do much, much more, but nevertheless, it illustrates the problem, and the dangers of this phenomenon. I’m glad I’m out of it, though I remain disturbed by how even intelligent people, and people who are aware of the dangers inherent, for example, in the industrialisation of food and the destruction of our environment, are utterly impervious to any formulation of the arguments marshalled against this most recent craze.