You may see the line as clear -- at the moment -- but the line often moves.
The line most certainly moves, as Michael Zimmer's Facebook example makes clear. His case shows how expectations, laws, regulations, and practices can change over time. But even aside from changes over time, the term "public" has many meanings and understandings. In a 2006 article, Pamela Samuelson identified 13 different meanings for "public domain" just in US copyright law -- and while "public domain" is by no means the same as "public," her point applies to public as well. [Samuelson, Pamela. (2006). Enriching discourse on public domains. Duke Law Journal, 55, 101-169.] And we're not even beginning to talk about differing notions of "public" across cultural and international boundaries. Heidi McKee and I have talked about this issue at some length in our book, The Ethics of Internet Research (Peter Lang, 2009; forward by Charles Ess). What we said about the public-private distinction was this (to quote at length):
What we see is an emergent consensus among researchers that the public-private distinction should not be regarded so much as a binary with two unambiguously clear meanings at either end, but rather as an interrelated continuum (Bruckman, 2002a; Bruckman, 2002b). As Susan Gal (2002) argued, ³Œpublic¹ and Œprivate¹ are not particular places, domains, spheres of activity, or even types of interaction [. . .] they are also, and equally importantly, indexical signs that are always relative: dependent for part of their referential meaning on the interactional context in which they are used." The distinctions of public-private are fractal because ³the distinction between public and private can be reproduced repeatedly by projecting it onto narrower contexts or broader ones.² Gal cites as one example the ³privacy² of the house: Within the public space of a city or street, a house is private. But within the house, there are ³public spaces² (the living room) and ³private spaces² (the bedroom, the bathroom), and within those spaces the conventions for disclosing information can vary on the people interacting and their degree of trust with one another. Thus, notions of public and private are not coherent and distinctive, but rather ³fractalized² where the distinction between the concepts operates at different levels of granularity (Lange, 2007; Gal, 2002).<<
Of course the discussion rests on a fundamental assumption about the ethics of research: that what human subjects *think* about that public-private distinction should be a factor in our deliberations about whether to seek informed consent. Most human subjects aren't taking the time to read the 56-page user TOS, and we shouldn't expect them to. Best, Jim Porter ------------------------------------ James E. Porter, Professor Department of English and Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies Director of College Composition Department of English Bachelor Hall 356A Miami University Oxford, OH 45056 email: porterje@muohio.edu twitter: http://twitter.com/reachjim web: http://www.units.muohio.edu/english/People/Faculty/I_P/PorterJames.html ------------------------------------