Is it possible to be anti-social in today’s world?
Even when we’re lying in bed being “anti-social,” what are we really doing? Staring at our phones, scrolling through social media? Reading books full of words and messages?
Human writing practices seem to be innately social—we write so that our words may be read.
Marilyn Cooper profoundly comments on this social nature of writing in her essay “The Ecology of Writing.” In it, she rejects the previously postulated cognitive process model of writing as being too internalized and solitary. Instead, she argues that writing occurs within a complex, reciprocal ecology, in which readers shape the process of writing and writers shape that of reading. In other words, this ecological model hinges on social interaction between writers and readers.
But perhaps humans can be a little too social, reading communications they weren’t supposed to. In response to this need for increased privacy, I would argue that an anti-social writing process has arisen: encryption.
Encryption is the scrambling or encoding of data to prevent unauthorized entities from reading it; only the parties with the key to unlock the encryption can interpret the data. Search engines do it all the time to protect our precious data, which they claim not to sell but still manage to monetize and distribute to advertisers. Ohio State physics professor Dan Gauthier created “tamper-proof” encryption for drones, exploiting minute discrepancies in drones’ microchips to make data purportedly impossible to read.
The reasoning for encryption’s proposed status as an anomalously anti-social writing process stems from the separation of the writing processes of data and encryption; the data being encrypted already exists in a legible form—it has already been written. Encryption is a subsequent, discrete writing process aimed entirely at making this data unreadable (see the image below).
But what about other forms of private writing, like diaries or Morse Code? Couldn’t these be considered anti-social writing processes?
As for diaries, the societal taboo or expectation of privacy makes them anti-social, not the physical writing itself; a diary user inevitably enters their writing into the social conversation by creating the possibility of it being read.
With Morse Code, the act of encoding causes you to inevitably transcribe the message—you still spell out all the words, just with different symbols (and hence participate in social writing). But encryption comes in after the message has been written and simply scrambles or locks the preexisting data. The text of encryption itself is often a series of algorithms, not a message.
Yet, despite the anti-social nature of encryption, it is still reactionary and reciprocal, like the writing and reading that takes place in Cooper’s ecology. Encryption must adapt as unauthorized “readers” become better at “reading” encrypted data, and these “readers” must also adapt if they want to intercept and interpret encrypted data.
Surely this is not a position Cooper expected to defend—an anti-social writing process infiltrating her social ecology of writing—yet it is an interesting one nonetheless.