So I’m taking a Cyberlaw class this semester, and one of the reoccurring themes is how law struggles to keep up with the advancements in technology—not just in regulating cyberspace, but in conceptualizing it. Law is an animal of deductive reasoning and precedent, it doesn’t move into new spaces gracefully, and the virtual sphere is very very new.
Which means that in applying law to cyberspace, what you end up with is a lot of metaphors trying to make the intangible tangible so it can fit into a determination that already exists. Answering a question like “Do you have a reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to the emails you transmit via Google’s servers?” depends very much on how you conceive of emails, servers, and transmission. Is it like mail being delivered by a postman? Is it like a conversation between you and a friend in the privacy of your house? A public place, like a coffeeshop? A semi-public place like a backyard?
Is a politician’s twitter like a public forum, or is it like their office, or is it like running up to them in the street?
If you set up an etsy shop, is that like setting up a physical store? Where?
And different cases try to answer these questions in different ways, but I keep getting stuck on—well, how rhetorically fascinating these arguments are. We created this powerful technical thing, a marvel of modern science, and yet whenever we want to talk about how people interface with it, we go back to the things they can touch and work from there.
