“Terms of Service,” the first book from the young cultural critic Jacob Silverman, is less an argument than a tour. Its subject is the Internet—or, more accurately, what Silverman calls “the social web,” which could be loosely defined as either a) an Internet experienced tailored to YOU!, or b) a surveillance system that comes equipped with some nice photo-saving and message-sharing tools.
Silverman leans toward interpretation b. “Communication,” he writes, “has become synonymous with surveillance.” “Terms of Service” offers a tour of a digital world that, under Silverman’s guiding skepticism, comes to look like a cross between the reality show “Big Brother” and a shopping mall. Or, to adapt one of Silverman’s better analogies, it’s a digital sphere in which we are all, essentially, the world’s saddest tourists: isolated and gullible; self-conscious and secretly watched; sampling everything but lingering nowhere; and taking many, many photos.
Over a phone connection that may or may not have been monitored by the NSA (it certainly wouldn’t have been hard), Silverman spoke with Salon about privacy, Tumblr’s hypocrisy, and whether the Internet is sometimes too nice.
Your book makes two arguments that often appear together in social media critiques. One is that social media companies are invading our privacy. The other is that social media is making us shallow—even narcissistic. How are these two arguments connected?
Social media companies want you to present as much of yourself as possible. The privacy standpoint is to say that they want you to fork over personal data, things about yourself that are true. The way that plays out on a cultural level is that we’re constantly engaged in these acts of performance and identity play, and presenting our ideal digital selves.