Facebook Pictures: And Again
I recently wrote about the absurdity of using social networking photos as indisputable evidence in a piece called Puritanical, Tyrannical, Overreaching Public Schools. I centered my argument around events at Eden Prairie High School, events which have been essentially repeated at Woodbury High School (my alma mader). I’ll keep writing the same journal until something changes, I guess. Here’s the story this time around: instead of controversial pictures being reported to the school by an anonymous meddling informant (as they were at Eden Prairie), they were shown by a student at Woodbury High School as part of a health presentation about underage drinking. The common reaction is: “wow those students sure are stupid for putting these pictures online, then presenting them to a class.” Such a statement is an oversimplification of the situation and it conflates stupidity with naïveté. Allow me to explain.
Last time I wrote about this, I strongly emphasized the idea that Facebook, et al. are public websites. The quote I pulled out from the Eden Prairie incident (reproduced below) seems to contradict my assertion that students understand “publicly available,” but bear with me:
“Everyone thinks it’s pretty weird,” [Kalaidis] said. “I think it’s a huge invasion of privacy.”
In the Pioneer Press article about the Woodbury events, we see this:
“It’s kind of like invading privacy even though it’s on a public Internet site,” Richter said.
Two points about these two quotes. One: their striking similarity is indicative of a worrisome homogeneity in news reporting. Two, and more importantly, these students are showing their naïveté (not stupidity). There can be no doubt that with their technological savvy, they fully understand that public pictures are freely available to anyone, including school administrators. However, students have assumed that school administrators have better things to do than examine individual pictures and pass judgment on what is perceived as evidence. You see, in their quotes the students aren’t calling out privacy in the legal sense, but in the sense that they understand it — these pictures are public snapshots of private events. During the party/gathering nobody was caught with a drink in hand, nobody was given a breathalyzer test, and nobody was booked for underage drinking (if they had been, punishments would already have been meted out, and this situation wouldn’t exist). Students had the party, took the pictures, nobody was hurt, and everyone went home; it is reasonable, then, to say that events and repercussions from this aforementioned party/gathering are not anything other than a private matter. Legally, I think this viewpoint holds water: formal steps have not been taken to prove that these pictures are representative of the events that actually took place, yet 4 students have already been punished. On top of all this, easily modified digital snapshots that are second or third hand simulacrums of events do not a case for underage drinking make. One could easily place these photos even lower on the reliability scale than a teacher overhearing talk of drinking. As we saw before, however, legal rights seem to have failed to show up on school administrator’s radars.
An analogous situation could involve speeding. Let’s say some student drives his Camaro 90 miles per hour and takes a picture of the speedometer. He posts the picture on Facebook and another student uses that picture in a health class presentation about the dangers of speeding. Who in their right mind would decide to expel this student from his driver’s ed. course at the high school? In this situation, the administration is doing the equivalent of exactly that.
Finally, principal Woodbury High School Principal Linda Plante is quoted:
… because the photos were brought into our building, it is our obligation to address any violations of school rules they might depict.
In an attempt to head off arguments that transgressions took place off school grounds and without reliable witnesses, Plante lays down some serious doublespeak by saying that this incident was brought onto school grounds. In doing so, she attempts to give the impression that some insidious aspect of underage drinking is invading the school; this is an implicit attempt to justify an inquisitorial school administration. Look, Woodbury High School, the biggest case you’ve got is punishing a student for showing controversial pictures of people in a presentation without those person’s consent and disrupting class as a result. You have no first-hand testimony from any reliable sources that drinking took place. In fact, you have nothing that qualifies as evidence. You can not, should not, and if I had a way to stop it would not punish students on the basis of such circumstantial, questionable, and extraordinarily mutable pictures.
Comments
Nils
I second all that Alex has here typed. Rock on, Alex.