7 October 2007
On 1 October 2007, Bob Tedeschi wrote about the success of online consumer spending by women in the cosmetics industry, thereby attesting to the "Web [as]...a much better place to showcase their products" ("When Beauty Is More Than a Click Deep", The New York Times). He goes on to identify not just cosmetics, but also clothing and travel as the top items women purchase online.
An artricle by Michelle Higgins corroborates Tedeschi on the travel front, as she explains the different prices travel, airline, and car rental companies will charge online depending on the country or point of sale location you make the purchase ("When the Best Deals Don't End in .Com", The New York Times, 30 September 2007). She ends her informative study by stating:
"So while the foreign version of a travel Web site might not always lead to the lowest price, it might just lead you to a destination you never would have thought to visit."
With Brian Stelter's article about the TV Guide and the success of its multiple platforms (especially online), we learn that web consumerism does not stop at material purchases, but also consists of a rather heavy immersion with entertainment ("When You Can't Wait for a Favorite Program", The New York Times, 5 October 2007). Although this may not be 'news' to those readily incorporating the net into their quotidien, the significance here lies in the proven active participation in and inclusion of virtuality qua internet within everyday reality.
Here, technology and virtuality is incorporated so readily and seemlessly to mediate the individual's lifestyle.
Through HealthVault, Microsoft is planning to further this direction by providing "a secure, encrypted database" for the storage of an individual's "personal health record" (Steve Lohr, "Microsoft Rolls Out Heallth Records", The New York Times, 4 October 2007). Through its database, Microsoft "hopes that individuals will give doctors, clinics and hospitals permission to directly send into their HealthVault record information like medicines prescribed or...test results showing blood pressure and cholesterol levels." On this front, however, there is critical need for pause.
On 21 August 1996, the 104th Congress passed into public law the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to (among other things) "combat waste, fraud, and abuse in health insurance and health care delivery" and above all, "to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of the information; to protect against any reasonably anticipated threats or hazards to the security or integrity of the information; and unauthorized uses or disclosures of the information" (Public Law 104-191).
If the need for privacy of personal information and the handling of such information by medical and healthcare professionals were identified as so crucially necessary that a law and protocols with that law had to be executed into effect with the threat of legal ramifications if so violated, why would a proposed database against that law be so quickly proposed?
Although Microsoft explains that the database will be secure and encrypted, have we not learned the lessons of the agile hacker mind? There are countless cases and a cornucopia of ocular proof that information - especially on the net - is a 'sitting duck' in hacker territory. To offset the possibility of data corruption, Peter Neupert, VP of Microsoft's health group, makes the analogy to online banking that initially met with privacy worries and is today mainstream. I beg to differ.
There are still many who are justifiably hesitant to disclose their financial information online - can we say, "identity theft"? So no, banking is NOT mainstream.
Banking aside, if financial information is hacked into, it can be reversed and corrected. Banks and credit card companies anticipate hackers and identity thieves so much so that they have swift and effective protocols in place to correct the fraudulent activity. However, when personal information - health or otherwise - is hacked into, there is no corrective reversal. The information is the key. To disclose that information to anyone other than the patient or medical/healthcare professional it is intended for is the irreversable violation and infringement that HIPAA sought so painstakingly to safeguard.
On quite a different side to this spectrum of the internet mediated lifestyle, is the recent "crucial legal victory for record labels and other copyright owners" with the verdict against Jammie Thomas for making available song files on her computer (Jeff Leeds, "Labels Win Suit Agaisnt Song Sharer", The New York Times, 5 October 2007). As a turn of events to the breadth, scope, and extent of liability qua file sharing, the judge ruled that "for jurors to find her liable, the record labels did not have to prove that songs on Ms. Thomas's computer had actually been transmitted to others online. Rather, the act of making them available could be viewed as infringement."
A striking blow to the network as such, indeed!
Thomas' penalty? A $222,000 fine!
In summation then, while it is acceptable for technology as entertainment to mediate consumer-driven lifestyles through the web, as seen with the articles on cosmetics, travel, and television programming, and while individuals are encouraged en masse to share their personal and highly sensitive medical information over an online database, the individual is barred from file-sharing for fear of heavy punitive damages - all in the name of copyright protection. Apparently, a song is more important to safeguard than a person's medical history.
As a medium of entertainment, electronic and digital technologies are quickly made available for consumer consumption and the web is heavily marketed (dare say, exploited) to target such consumerism. However, when there is a filter on what information is and is not accessible, companies are treading recklessly at the expense of the same individual they target as their consumer audience. Quite clearly, safeguards are in place to protect corporations. At the same time, individual (privacy) rights are increasingly being infringed upon and corrupted.
Entertainment is only a fraction of a percentage of this currently disjointed reality. There exists a dialogue between entertainment and reality as multiple spheres of virtuality that needs to be translated and incorporated into everyday action. Indeed, amongst the myriad program offerings on network television, there seems to be a strong emergence concentrating on the super-real, other-worldliness, heroism, and the super-natural - all of which are in effect, multiple realms of virtuality.
Examples include and are not limited to:
1) Moonlight (CBS) about the vampire with all resulting themas of the undead and the immortal with supernatural physical abilities.
2) Ghost Whisperer (CBS) about clairvoyance, otherworldliness, and the life of the dead.
3) Reaper (CW11) about the devil's bounty hunter brought to a younger target audience - think Ghost Rider scaled to the CW11 demographic.
4) Smallville (CW11) about Superman's formative years into young adulthood along with other DC Comics characters.
5) Supernatural (CW11) - well, it is in the title.
6) Chuck (NBC) about a machine absorbed by the mind resulting in the literal transformation of a man into a database.
7) Heroes (NBC) about a group of individuals with incredible powers to be 'heroic'.
8) Journeyman (NBC) about a man who travels through time.
There is thus, a new language in the entertainment sphere of suspended disbelief that needs to be anchored into the current reality and a new ontology. The resulting language must be a structural re-evaluation of meaning that is altogether too quickly accepted as given. Until then, the ruptures of disjoints will continue to erupt as fissures of irreparable and indelible infringements upon the individual.
Even worse, entertainment as the last bastion of relief and 'refueling' will no longer be sufficient to overcome the increasingly insurmountable fissures. Rather, they will be a reminder of the denigrated integrity of an erstwhile doxa where disbelief can no longer be suspended.
