Geoffrey Nunberg, an adjunct professor of linguistics at the School of Information (iSchool), has contributed witty commentaries to NPR’s Fresh Air for more than 25 years. His highly anticipated annual feature, “Word of the Year,” calls out a word or phrase that best illustrates the changes in our culture and lives. His choice for 2014 — “God view” — is the term the car company Uber uses for a map view locating its drivers and customers. The media seized on the term last fall when Uber came under fire for tracking and displaying the movements of some customers. In his perspective below, Nunberg explores our discomfort with being the unwitting object of technology’s gaze — and the sense of “creepiness” that has become ubiquitous in the Internet Age.
“It doesn’t look good when the people entrusted with the information come off as a crew of brash striplings who seem to take privacy casually.
Calling a display God view didn’t help dispel that impression, particularly coming from a company whose name already suggested a certain Teutonic grandiosity. But if Uber’s choice of words was ill-advised, it’s still a pretty apt name for the way technology sees us now. Every week brings another indication that the world is becoming a place where everybody can be observed without being aware of it. An app displays the Facebook profile of every woman in the immediate vicinity who’s logged in on Foursquare. A website streams live video from thousands of unsecured webcams along with their map locations. And we’re dogged by those uncannily personalized ads as we browse the web.
In a course I co-teach at Berkeley, we ask our students to try to figure out what Google knows about them. One young woman tried switching to a new browser and entering searches for products like Stride Rite Shoes and Barry Manilow albums. She wasn’t surprised when ads for menopause supplements started to appear on the web pages she visited, but it was unsettling when her boyfriend started seeing ads for Viagra.
What we’re talking about here, of course, is the sense that the world is getting more and more creepy.… It’s become our reflexive response to the unnerving promiscuity of digital information. Scholars ponder it. You see articles in academic journals and law reviews with titles like “A Theory of Creepiness” and “Leakiness and Creepiness in App Space.” As the thinking goes, understand creepiness and you’ve located the boundaries of personal privacy, the line you mustn’t trespass.
Creepy is a more elusive notion than scary. Scary things are the ones that set our imagination to racing with dire scenarios of cyberstalkers, identity thieves, or government surveillance, whereas with creepy things, our imagination doesn’t really know where to start. There doesn’t have to be any concrete threat we can point to. There’s only the unease we feel when we realize we’ve been the object of somebody’s unbidden gaze. A while ago, my wife was caught by Google Street View early one morning as she was opening our gate after taking out the garbage. It creeped her out. “You can see me from Buenos Aires,” she said, “and I wouldn’t even wear those pants to the Safeway.”
Not that most of the builders of the technology are actively trying to creep us out, though they’re willing to come close. As Google’s Eric Schmidt said, Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line but not cross it. But that line is constantly moving as we get more and more used to being exposed.…
Follow that logic, some people say, and the creepiness of technology may come to seem a passing phase. But this isn’t really about technology in the first place. What we find creepy isn’t those God views in themselves, but the people we fear might be out there using them. There may be no more creeps in the world than in earlier times, but there’ve never been so many opportunities for acting like one.”
Visit http://n.pr/1BavHba for the full transcript.
