The employee says, “My problem with paper is that all communication dies with it. It holds no possibility of continuity [. . .]. It ends with you. Like you’re the only one who matters [. . .] but if you’d been using a tool that would help confirming the identity of whatever birds you saw, then anyone can benefit. [. . .] Knowledge is lost every day through this sort of shortsightedness.” The problem was that Mae chose to reflect her experience “only” back to herself rather than relay it to the Circle’s data pool. Her choice of recording technology (paper versus smartphone or tablet) and the refusal to connect to wider data systems that this choice implied, is interpreted back to her in moral terms when Mae is told that “knowledge is lost every day through this sort of shortsightedness.” The senior Circle employee who criticizes Mae believes that there is no space in which an individual is free to reflect on herself that is not already a space over which her corporation, acting in the name of social knowledge, has right of access.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 502