i think with the examples i have in mind, i am always thinking of orlikowski's idea of constitutive entanglement: looking not only at what technology leverages or only at the meaning people give to it, but to see how the two are constitutively entangled. for example manu luksch worked with people communicating in sign language and the fact that their conversation gets captured by cctv cameras and cctv workers. this is a loss of privacy that those communicating using sound will in most cases still be able to maintain. further, most telecommunication companies keep sms messages and use them for content and community analysis. hence, the communication may become more private with respect to the surroundings of those communicating, but by virtue of being text communication through a curious provider, sms are less private then a conversation using mobile phones (unless of course, the state of the art in voice recognition allows all conversations to be smoothly transcribed, searched, analyzed, etc.). Disclaimer: http://www.kuleuven.be/cwis/email_disclaimer.htm