Oliver Sipple was fearless, by just about anyone’s standards.
He was a decorated US Marine, a veteran of the conflict in Vietnam. He was active in local politics and charities. He saved the life of President Gerald Ford by thwarting an assassination attempt in 1975.
But he was scared of social networks – his circle of family, friends, acquaintances, and others around him. He was scared of being visible as gay, which he hid from lots of his networks.
After he grabbed the gun out of a would-be assassin’s hand, saving President Ford’s life, he was the subject of national media attention. To combat the notion gay men were “timid, weak and unheroic”, his friend and gay rights icon Harvey Milk outed him.
Sipple never recovered. He went into a depressive spiral that eventually cost him his life. Later in his short life, Sipple would say that he wished he never grabbed the gun on that day in 1975.
Dr. danah boyd (she doesn’t use capitals) used this tragic example to show how social networks – offline, in Sipple’s case, and on – can inspire fear. Because with social networks comes visibility. When you are visible, you are vulnerable, and ultimately fearful of what’s out there.
boyd is a researcher at Microsoft, and affiliated with a number of universities. But mainly she is an intriguing character – obsessed with how teenagers use the internet, social networks and queer and geek cultures. She’s also a 34-year-old woman who dresses like a pixie.
And I think she’s brilliant.
At her SXSWi talk, boyd applied her fear of social networks theory to a dizzying number of real-life scenarios. I couldn’t keep track, but she referenced the moral panic around MySpace stalking, cyberbullying, the Arab Spring, French philosopher Michel Foucault, the #Kony2012 campaign, immigration in Texas and much, much more.
“But it’s about the people who make the networks,” she said in one of her more straightforward points. “The people who make the networks can control the system. They control how information flows, they control the kind of messages we receive.
“What we’re seeing is traditional structures of power are coming in to control the major networks.”
She was basically talking about how real life gets turned into easy-to-understand narratives when they become public to networks of people. And part of that reductive story-telling comes down to who controls the network.
Our lives, to the media, or to Twitter, or whomever, morph into binary stories. Short, simple, easy to understand, with heros, villains and endings. But, obviously, life is much more complicated.
So we fear our lives becoming public, to just be reduced to an easily digestible story. Oliver Sipple, for instance, was a man who led a complex life. But in the view of the outside world, his outer social networks, he was simply a “gay hero”.
It was an academic, if sometimes erudite, take on a very complicated issue. Needless to say, boyd has a lot of different strands going through her head. I readily admit I did not understand where most of it was going. But I liked every word.
joshuae@nowtoronto.com | @joshuaerrett
