Intrusions and preclusiveness

Online, December 2024.

It was the day the phone didn’t stopped vibrating. My number had been included in a group of a hundred users of the Telegram application. The administrator invited us to carry out microtasks paying 5 euros apiece. We had to “‘follow’ or ‘like’ the Instagram accounts of public figures, companies, influencers, bloggers and others” listed among 22 pages, send a screenshot and click on a link to receive instant payment. Some users archived or left the conversation promptly, others sought to verify the credibility of the proposal and while some, like me, stood silently bewildered behind their screens watching what was happening. As the morning wore on, the number of members declined as interactions with the administrator multiplied. The first payments had been made, and the group administrator began to propose other “available tasks”, with higher remuneration and the possibility of becoming an employee of the company after three days. Then my silence and lack of involvement appeared suspicious, and the next morning I was deleted from the group.
Internet is full of pages and videos describing the mechanics of this type of scam. There are also “scambaiters”, Internet users engaged in the fight against online scams, seeking to waste their time and resources, alert potential victims and, sometimes, help the autorities to identify the perpetrators.
Following Erving Goffman, I perceived the inclusion of my number in this conversation as an intrusion into my personal territory: unsolicited notifications invaded my screen, imposing their presence, this administrator demanding a part of my attention and claiming to exercise a right over an object that is fully part of what I need to function.
And, at the same time, the silence I kept all day, when he could see that I was reading the messages, this preclusiveness, may have appeared as another kind of offence to his ‘offer’. These behaviours highlighted in Relations in Public constitute heuristic tools for grasping the rules of a social order at a distance, outside the context of co-presence, and made up of, among other things, writing, reading and electricity.