Privacy is Theft?
Modern technology gives a lot of possibilities for people in everyday life. It is easier to stay in touch with your family and relatives, work more efficiently and make shopping. But more and more people nowadays are concerned about the privacy of their lives and security in digital age, as all their information becomes available for everyone who wants to know it via social media resources. The topic has been raised all the time by many people, but we always postpone it, thinking that it is not a right time to consider it. But it has found its literal impact in the book of Dave Eggers The Circle. The main character of the novel is Mae Holland, and through her the author wants to bring to us the main ideas of his work. The point of the work is that social media has penetrated our lives, thus it penetrated our privacy and personal security as well. And this circumstance has both positive and negative effects on people’s lives. In the novel it is explored through the lives of Mae friends and acquaintances. Some of them benefited from social media impact, like as it shown by exploration of Annie’s life and interactions between her families. But some of the characters have not benefited from this influence and it is shown on the example of Mae’s former boyfriend, who was restraint about social technologies and as it shown, he ended up badly. The novel is engaging due to the importance and powerfulness of the topics discussed in it. The themes are up-to-date and thus they are exciting to many people. However, the plot of the story is not rich enough in narrative conflicts to keep the attention of the reader, but still the work is worthy due to its discussion of modern problems of privacy and security in the modern world.
The key character of the book is Mae. She is a bright graduator, who finds a job in flourishing and successful company The Circle. It is a fictional organization, which deals with all social media. Mae is fascinated with her work from the beginning; she spends all her time there, not even having time to go to her parents. By the end, she has 9 screens, because she needs to share information and communicate all the time. But her friend and co-worker, Annie, notices very soon that their private life is not only their private life any more, as they even can’t go with Mae during the break and share secrets, being afraid that it will be known to all organization very soon. They can’t behave the way they want to, because everything will be known immediately, due to the social media. Not only Annie sees the changes which are happening in her and Mae’s life, Mae’s family and boyfriend tell her the same. One of the strongest scenes is happening between Mae and her boyfriend, Mercer:
"You know what I think, Mae? I think you think that sitting at your desk, frowning and smiling somehow makes you think you're actually living some fascinating life. You comment on things, and substitutes for doing them. You look at pictures of Nepal, push a smile button, and you think that it's the same as actually going there. I mean, what would happen if you actually went? Your CircleJerk rating or whatever-the-fuck would drop below an acceptable level! Mae, do you realize how incredibly boring you've become?" (Eggers 261).
It seems that only Mae is not noticing that her life is any more private.
Claire Luchette, in her article discusses such topics as privacy and personhood in The Circle book. Regarding the topic of the book, she raises the question to us if the privacy is selfish and what does it brings to save the privacy. She outlines that Mae’s losing her privacy didn’t make her happier, vise versa she became very inert. Mae has to think before doing something in her life. Claire states that the problem of Mae is not only hers; it concerns every one of us. She also outlines that we need to take this book seriously and it demands our deep meditation and awareness right now.
Is the Circle our realia?
Nowadays, everyone can catch himself sitting in front of the screen for hours, chatting with friends and family online and even ‘checking in’ every place you go. This is a modern life, and it makes our own life submitted to social media. Social media is like a ‘helping hand’ and there it is even more interesting than in real life. People suppose they can feel more free and important there. Dave Eggers, in his book The Circle discusses this nowadays panacea by creating the fiction organization The Circle, where everything is about social media. The sad issue that arises before us from our reality is that social media is making people anti-social, bounded to a false, self-perpetuating and meaningless cycle. People become dependent to this cycle, thinking that online conversations can substitute the real life. The profile that we can create in the Internet can be wittier, more active and interesting. With the Internet we can’t realize where our virtual selves end and where our real selves start. Eggers creates a fiction the Circle organization, which includes in it all type of social media, ‘subsumed Facebook, Twitter, [and] Google’. This conglomerate is like a dream place for workers, with lots of parks, dormitory areas, grocery stores and everything that the employees can dream about. Eggers also describes the character, Mae who is central in the story and who after graduating the university, gets this dream work in the Circle. She is completely involved in her work answering the questions from the customers and asking them to rate her work. She tries her best and participates in all company’s events. Mae does not realize that slowly she becomes swamped into this virtual and perfect world. She can’t live and communicate without Internet, blogging and putting pictures. Mae forgets about the reality and lives in totally virtual world.
The perfect world in which Eggers puts his character, Mae is obviously a fiction. But the thing is that is not it our reality, just little bit in maximization? The reader understands that all that is happening in the story is not true, but at the same time it is very closed to what is happening in modern world, where we can’t live without social media. This maximization is created for people to stop and realize our nowadays reality. That we are in circle just like Mae. But our circle is our own lives. While Mae is obsessed by the world she is living in, people who surround her try to tell her about that. One of the characters who is the most harsh in this sense is her ex-boyfriend, Mercer. He tells that everything what she does in Circle is not important and that it is not real. But Mae likes her job, and continues to be a good worker. But Circle demands from its employees total submission. Thus, after one event, they tell her:
"Not good. I know that. But I was at the circus event and that was great. So great." [Mae]
"It was great, wasn't it? And it was great to see you there. But we have no record of you being there. No photos, no zings, no reviews, notices, bumps. Why not?" [Dan]
"I don't know. I guess I was caught up in the--" [Mae]
"Dan sighed loudly. "You do know that we like to hear from people, right? That Circlers' opinions are valued? "(Eggers 178).
The main question put in the Eggers’ book is that what happens when private companies have too much personal information and each your move, desire and action is recorded? Ellen Ullman in her review of The Circle book for The New York Times writes that the two main things about this reality are Secrets are lies and Privacy is Theft. She states that the reality of the Circle is that everyone’s past and present is revealed and recorded, nothing can be ever erased and that the Circle’s main aim is to have all aspects of people’s lives and these lives are revealed to all world.
Marketing through Social Media
Marketing has many tools and tactics but with the entering the technological digital era, marketers got a new sophisticated tool, which can gather all the needed information very quickly. This tool is Social Media. While we think that there is nothing special and personal in sharing the information from your life and filling the innocent application like ‘What do you prefer?’, marketers gather very important information from this and apply it further in their work. Dave Eggers in the form of fiction gives us very truthful and right picture of nowadays world. The main focus of his book is social media and its impact on people’s lives. The criticism is on social media, marketing connected to social media and gathering the data for marketing. Pretending not so serious, social media is very powerful tool to collect the information for marketing studies, by exploring the people’s private life, preferences, interests and hobbies. This idea is conducted in Dave Eggers book The Circle, with the life of the girl Mae who is working in fictional conglomerate and people who surround her. The author tries to answer the question of what is happening in nowadays world, and the answer which comes is very simple, it is being created a totalitarian regime, where everyone is submissive and the private life is completely absent. He also shows that media marketing is much more powerful in this world of total submission. The book’s character Mae is working for very powerful social media organization in Customer Experience department. In order to fit in with the work she is asked all the time to enhance her social media presence. She needs to update her social media profile all the time because her social media popularity is measured according to this. Also the necessary part of the work is to answer the market research questions. The following questions concern each aspect of Mae’s life and by filling them she thinks that she makes the world better. To gain the importance and popularity in this fiction organization, Mae has to carry the camera with her all the time, to record everything she experiences. Also she gains a ‘raw conversion score’ – where she earns money just by putting smiles on what she likes in the Internet.
It becomes completely obvious that she is obsessed. But what is sad Mae does not want to listen to people who tell her about that. Her boyfriend criticizes her the most:
"Here's the thing, and it's painful to say this to you. But you're not very interesting anymore. You sit at a desk twelve hours a day and you have nothing to show for it except some numbers that won't exist or be remembered in a week. You're leaving no evidence that you lived. There's no proof" (Eggers 260).
The novel by Dave Eggers is sometimes supposed not to have enough plot and characters depth. Some people even say that it is a fairy-tale or fiction. But most of us will find themselves in the character of Mae who is obsessed with social media and can’t live without it. The book is also very profound about social media marketing. The book critic Ron Charles states that The Circle is the description of the Brave New World, and moreover it is the description of our modern world. He says that now we just live and move and Egger’s novel can be just too fast, too troubling and too smart for us nowadays. He says that people now can’t make a look into the future and realize that the world can be reshaped just by the work of several witty and clever marketers. The thing is that Dave Eggers tries to make us aware of the present reality by creating this slightly over exaggerated fiction.
Works Cited:
Eggers, Dave. The Circle. Print.
Bustle.com. N.p., 2016. Web. 11 Apr. 2016.
Circle, Mercer. "The Circle: Mercer Vs. The Circle". Thecirclers.blogspot.com. N.p., 2014. Web. 11 Apr. 2016.
"Social Media Marketing In A Dystopian Novel: Dave Eggers&Amp;#039; &Quot;The Circle&Quot;". Social Media Today. N.p., 2015. Web. 11 Apr. 2016.
Scadding, Jon. "Review: The Circle By Dave Eggers (Part 2)". JB Muttnik. N.p., 2014. Web. 11 Apr. 2016.
Atwood, Margaret. "When Privacy Is Theft". The New York Review of Books. N.p., 2013. Web. 11 Apr. 2016.
