Jeremy Hunsinger jhuns at vt.edu Mon Sep 5 10:32:31 PDT 2005
therefor, i think people should always tell people when things are meant to be private or held in confidence, otherwise you have to expect people to interpret the situation on their perceptions.
So, in other words, none of us has any expectation of privacy whatsoever, unless we make a disclaimer at the start of a every single interaction? That seems like a fast way to break down all communication in a society. If I have to preface every single interaction, face to face or not, with "this is private so don't quote me or repeat this to anyone" people who I talk to are going to think I've become so paranoid as to be completely non-functional. A dinner table conversation is a private interaction between the people at the table. Yes, it's in a public space and there are (or can be) more than two people involved and yes, other people who are not supposed to be hearing the conversation can overhear it. But they know that's "eavesdropping" and not something they are intended to be hearing. Everyone in that restaurant knows that what they overhear from another table is a conversation they are not supposed to be hearing and aren't part of, and, one assumes, even if they repeated it later, they would be unable to repeat with names attached since they are outside of what was a private interaction. Apparently in this case someone at the actual dinner table in question missed the memo. To take the contents of that dinner conversation and put it in a blog is rather like going around not just to every table in that one restaurant but a whole bunch of restaurants advertising what was formerly a conversation between a limited number of people and giving their names out. It takes something confined to a specific sphere of interaction (with the requisite expectations of that sphere) and puts it on a stage, altering the expectations entirely. I've seen a number of issues lately on various blogs regarding linking to other blog discussions and what happens when a post that, while open to the public, is suddenly thrust into the spotlight by being linked and garners a lot of attention. When the author is completely unprepared for it, the results have in every case been not pretty. The authors have no apparent defense because they were speaking in public, but the fact that their expectation was different from the reality doesn't seem to justify for a lot of people their discomfort. In other words, this is an issue spreading far and wide beyond just academics worried that every conversation they have could suddenly become a matter of record. Stephanie Tuszynski ----- "Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art. It has no survival value. Rather, it is one of the things that give value to survival." --C.S. Lewis.