following up a bit - I found this remark so intriguing because it is so wonderfully consistent with the sense of the relational self predominant in many indigenous societies as well as Buddhist and Confucian ones. In contrast with the modern Western sense of the individual as a core point of freedom (which justifies the rights ostensibly to be protected by the liberal-democratic state) and thereby of individual privacy as a _positive_ good (e.g., as a core space protecting development of self, choice, expression, etc.) - in indigenous/Confucian/Buddhist societies, the only reason one would want privacy is - precisely because someone has something to hide, e.g., the Chinese word close to "privacy" (until 1985 or so) translates into something dirty, hidden. Ironically, so far as I can find in cross-cultural perspectives on the sense of self and related privacy expectations - Japanese, Chinese, and Thai youth (perhaps overly influenced by too much Western media, and certainly dependent upon a growing material prosperity that affords them their own rooms) are insisting more and more on Western-style individual privacy. By the same token, a new word has been introduced in Chinese to refer to privacy in a more positive sense. Meanwhile, we in the West - whether Google or McNealy - seem to be heading in the opposite direction. McLuhan wasn't right about everything, but I think he and Harley Parker got this one about right - though, apparently, far more sanguinely than I: To an ancient Greek the discovery of private identity was a terrifying and horrible thing that came about with the discovery of visual space and fragmentary classification. Twentieth-century man is travelling the reverse course, from an extreme individual fragmentary state back into a condition of corporate involvement with all mankind. Paradoxically, this new involvement is experienced as alienation and loss of private selfhood. -- Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker, Counterblast (1969) and, or so I worry, the foundations of liberal democracy. or maybe not. cheers, - charles On 2/16/10 3:06 AM, "Christian Fuchs" <christian.fuchs@sbg.ac.at> wrote:
Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently remarked about Internet privacy: "If you have something that you do not want anyone to know, maybe you should not be doing it in the first place², which points towards a lack of understanding of the online surveillance threat and privacy issues.