The Right Not to Know
Royal Holloway, Univ. of London
Andrew
Hoskins and I argue that the convergence of two shifts, one in the
connective politics of conflict and catastrophe, the other in the
connectivity of self, together generate the impossibility of claiming
ignorance. A few weeks ago an open letter from a Syrian village was posted on Twitter in English: "[The]
Assad regime is killing us and destroying our city. You are all
responsible for our death. Your silence is keeping him strong”. Crisis
mapping, satellite surveillance, citizen and professional news
reporting, NGO reporting: the Syrian villagers assume we see and we
know. Surveillance and sousveillance are conditions of this
impossibility of ignorance. This impossibility is a defining challenge
of the digital age partly because it manifests itself across the levels
of real world politics, culture, technology and self – an entire ecology
of knowing – that are often seen and treated as disconnected (and thus
hived off for abstract enquiry). This is not the same as the right to be
forgotten or the right to connect. A response requires something
greater than the sum of these parts, hence we are asking what would a
right not to know – notably a right that was not required of earlier
media ecologies – look like?
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