By now you may have read the story of the student in Manchester, NH who was arrested in his school cafeteria by a police officer who lifted him out of his seat, and forced him into a prone position on a table. Another student captured the video, and you can see it and the story here. Although the police handling of the situation was clearly disturbing, even more disturbing are the voices of the teachers caught trying to get the student recording to stop, and then attempted to take the phone away from him. By his report they did make him delete a couple of pictures, but the video went undiscovered until it went viral.
It’s time we get real about transparency in the professional world. My prediction is that the school administration will address this situation by trying to either enforce a no-cell phone policy or create a policy that prohibits the use of electronics on school grounds to record such incidents. I hope they don’t, and use this as an opportunity to open some conversations between school staff, parents, students, and officers. But I will be pleasantly surprised if that happens.
Professionals who work with people “in their care,” be it therapy, education or something else, often cite privacy concerns when it comes to transparency. I’m convinced that the reality is often that they want to protect their privacy as much as if not more than that of their patients. What happens behind closed doors is secret.
Remember that phrase “you’re only as sick as your secrets?”
Other professionals want to commute to work so they have a “private life.” They are outraged with the amount of information available about them online, information that their patients, students, anyone, can access about them. When I do public speaking about technology and therapy and education, I often find that privacy concerns boil down to this sort of fear and outrage. Sure, HIPAA is brought up, but that is usually in the context of another fear, getting sued.
I practice and encourage my colleagues to practice what I call “radical transparency.” I define Radical Transparency as engaging with technology as if it is always in the Public sphere visible to anyone. To be clear, this does not mean either never using technology to communicate about one’s personal or professional life. Nor does it mean telling everyone everything all the time. Rather, radical transparency means that before you “utter” anything via technology, and before any choices you make with technology, you consider what would happen if it one day comes to light.
I’m not saying you have to like radical transparency, I’m just saying that it is time we get clear with our relationship to technology and others with it. And I’m not saying I am perfect with it, but I try to comport myself with authenticity. If you search online you will (hopefully) not find my public posts or comments cutting or snide. If you somehow got hold of my emails over the past few years, what would emerge is an acerbic, funny, tart guy who is prone to arrogance and does not suffer fools gladly. You’d find a good deal of kindness and wisdom as well, but certainly you’d find frustration, self-righteousness and negativity. In short, you’d glimpse my human condition. But there you have it, I am prepared to accept the revelation of any warts that may come along.
Radical transparency, I am suggesting, is not just about what you “put out there” on the internet. It is not about gussying yourself up so you are acceptable to everyone.
Radical Transparency is about getting clear, clear with yourself.
I have found two spiritual traditions especially helpful with this idea. The first is Buddhism, which talks about nonattachment and going to the places that scare you. But in this post I want to focus more on the second tradition which has influenced me, and I think may have some good insights into technology and our place in the world. That second tradition is Quakerism.
What I have learned from Quakers and my own connection to the Society of Friends, is the importance of gaining clearness, and discernment. One quote that sums up what I am saying is from an article written by M.L. Morrison in the book Spirituality, religion and peace education. In it she says:
“Key to a Quaker philosophy of education is the belief that each individual has the capacity for discerning the truth. The truth does not solely come from the teacher or mentor… The process of getting clear about a particular discernment implies testing it out in a community of fellow seekers. In this way individuals are accountable to the communities in which they live and learn and the community can support the strength and leadings of its members.” (Italics mine)
What if we started seeing the world, online and off as that sort of community? Get clear with who you are and what you’re about. Be authentic. And after you have achieved a certain amount of clarity have a discerning attitude about what you put out there about yourself, and above all behave as we feel we ought. Am I saying that we all need to adopt Buddhism or Quakerism? Of course not. But we need to start focussing first on who we are in the world, not who shouldn’t be videotaping us.
Technology is not going away folks. And adolescents are rightly exploring and testing the limits of it, because they will be using it to maintain, more accurately repair, the world we have given them. September 11th taught these kids that media can be used to bear witness to terrorism and injustice in real-time. And since then, Youtube has proliferated with videos of the atrocities professionals have perpetrated. I have seen a juvenile collapse walking around a courtyard of lockup, only to be kicked and ignored by the warden when he was in need of medical attention. I have seen a college student tasered in a library. We have seen an Iranian woman shot to death and die before our eyes.
And these images change us, and they go viral. This is what globalization is, this is our whole planet struggling to get clear. And there are lots of people, those in power, who want the status quo. Keep the doors shut so people have to “go through the proper channels.” But technology is trending towards dialogue and democracy. You just can’t get away with being cruel unobserved and often unchallenged. Make fun of a teen who may have Asperger’s and he’ll post a rebuttal on Youtube.
These are the same people as the teachers who try to take away the student’s cellphone, or the administrators that forced Matt Gomez to shut down his class Facebook page. All the parents had signed off on it, but concerns about privacy were still cited. And that again, I believe is often a professional rhetoric for “controlling access to information.”
I have worked on the inside of several school districts, and in all of them I saw stellar educators, people who were always taking risks and getting creative. And I saw lots of lazy, verbally abusive educators there as well. The way our education, and our mental health, systems are set up there are a lot of disempowered angry people working with even more disempowered angry people. And many are in the middle, trying to just keep their head low and not make waves. I know, because I have been all of these at one point or another.
This is not going to be as easy from now on. If you swear at a student, someone’s going to record it on their phone and have it posted on Youtube before you can blink. If you gripe about a patient on your Facebook page they’ll find it and call you on it. And those of you who are trying to just keep out of it all, we’ll see you too. And more importantly, you’ll see you, and when the kid you ignored being bullied because you didn’t want to deal with it that day kills himself, you’ll have to live with the guilt that thousands of people he never knew reach out to assure those like him that it gets better, while you, the person who saw him every day or week just sat there and did nothing.
Talking about patients online, getting rough with a student, shooting a woman–Yes, these are all very different events. But they all connect around the idea of an ethics of radical transparency. Or as Rainer Maria Rilke put it in “Archaic Torso of Apollo:”
for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
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Mike, I have fallen in love with the term “radical transparency,” wherein lies your visionary genius. This is what happened to me:
I started a Facebook account a few years ago, in hopes of contacting an alienated niece. Unsuccessful in this I planned to close the account, but I got a friend request from a client. Not wishing to be rude I accepted it, explaining that I was not going to keep the account. The client responded, “You should. It’s necessary these days.” I hesitated long enough that I found myself connected with family, friends and the client. What to do? Having been a member of online communities on the MSN Network in the ’90s, I found a a group of like-minded people, mostly married and around my age in various parts of the world. I rarely posted status messages. I soon had a mix of relatives, virtual friends, actual friends, colleagues and clients. I just stayed in my little group, which have since become big and turned in to a good many groups, and kept my wall clean, occasionally posting articles, music or videos I wanted to share. But I had already posted some photos. Lots of them. What to do? I did nothing and kept my activity at a minimum.
Before I realized it, my friends numbered in the hundreds. I didn’t want a professional page. I have worked for myself in three careers, all of which I sustained by word of mouth. I didn’t want to refuse the friend requests of clients, so I discussed it with them, saying that if they paid too much attention they might learn things about me that weren’t in their best interests, and I explored what this might mean. Most chose against friendship but many opted to remain friends. I play one game online from my iDevice. It has 15 million users worldwide, mostly teens, and as a player since 2008, and the oldest one on record, I am well-known. The game’s owners unintentionally published users’ full Facebook names, and a bug made it unfixable for some time. In a bit of a panic, I dropped my last name – I didn’t want my worlds in collision. The bug was fixed after I had over 30 teen friends, and at about the same time, important people in my field began to request connection. I tried to get my name back, and was told I wasn’t supposed to use an alias and that I had made too many name changes. I finally got it restored by posting my wedding photos of 35 years ago and tagging my husband.This led me to begin an autobiographical photo album to share and explore old family photos I had scanned. As Facebook began to smush people together and blur the boundaries for their own purposes, I found I was far more exposed than I imagined possible. Everyone saw every move I made. What to do now? I finally decided to just “be” in the Digital Age. I had long since joined it in every other way. Email and text messaging were a part of my life. If I had any secrets they were no longer secrets. I surrendered, and the result was excellent: My personal and professional lives were blended in a way I could never have planned nor expected. I posted a status message saying that anyone who didn’t want to know too much about me was welcome to “unfriend” me.
Instead of constructing myself for the public I found I was out there as myself. This has turned out to be better than any public relations or marketing strategy I might have planned. I never wanted to “sell” myself, but now I am out there AS myself. This is about when I saw this post, Mike. It was too late for any philosophy about how to present myself. I am radically transparent – without having made the conscious choices you recommend, but I have no problem with how it turned out. Many good connections have resulted. I have helped anyone who was troubled by it to discuss it with me. I did not have to construct a persona, nor to consider what I put out there. I am not an ad for myself as a professional; I am a person.
Your “radical transparency” has an added meaning to me: We had all better be comfortable in our own skin, and if we are not, we would do well to do something about it. To be sure I consider what I do online more carefully than I used to, but I have not had to sacrifice an enjoyable diversion I enjoy in spare moments. Instead, I have become comfortable being known as a person who continues to grow and develop, and I am no one different when I work than when I play. An added benefit is that I find my posts to various groups, although written for pleasure, often become notes for professional writing. Thank you for putting words to what I found quite by accident, and for developing the idea so beautifully!