Re: ssage: an Ess-ian Q: when does the personal becomes public?
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.
I have been intrigued by Barry's post and the responses that have ensued. My first reaction (and I would be curious if others shared this) was to ensure that I was not the culprit by doing a bit of googling. I don't think I am the... is "collaborator" the appropriate term ?... but the search did turn up a photograph of Barry on my blog, identified by name: http://alex.halavais.net/news/index.php?p=665 There is some irony that the photograph is from a workshop in Toronto on what Steve Mann has been calling "sousveillance." I find this use of imaging and other recording materials by citizens to be less liberating than he might find them. Yes, blogging, very broadly defined, has the potential of making our social lives far more transparent. I tend to think of this in a Brinian sense: the lesser of two evils, and seemingly inevitable. I have no doubt that I blog in the service of the secret and not-so-secret police of many nations. I also blog in the service of the secret and not-so-secret revolutionaries among us. And, heck, I'm also blogging for terrorism. The surveillance I engage in is open to all, and while more daylight can lead to sunburns, I think the benefits outweigh the potential harm. The kind of intrusions Barry is talking about are likely to lead to a rethinking of what constitutes personal privacy. It's worth remembering that the legal history of privacy in the US stems from precisely the sort of complaint made here. That is, people were sneaking cameras into private parties and publishing private conversations in public newspapers. From a US-centric perspective, you might go so far as to argue the combination of camera and penny-press invented the idea of privacy as we generally think about it now. I suspect that the cameraphone and blog will cause a similar shift. I personally do what I can to guess at whether someone's comments are "unbloggable." I think, like many, I follow a golden rule of blogging (publicize not lest thee be publicized), with an added safety buffer to account for my utter lack of shame. But an ethics of blogging will only take us so far. The present state of social access to archived life experience--and for me, cameraphones and other recording devices are far more intrusive than relayed personal narrative--have already changed how a large part of society interacts and expects to interact, as danah has noted above. I think the important question now is understanding how these boundaries are conceived within various groups; that is, making the invisible assumptions of bloggers of varying stripes more visible. I have a feeling that the academic setting adds a slight twist. While I might otherwise blog (or mention in a talk, etc.) an idea that I heard from "some dude" at a dinner, it strikes me that as scholars we have a special obligation to cite ideas that we may have gathered from others, even when the source of such observations are not found in a journal article. We have a particular difficulty when that obligation potentially interferes with observing perceived social propriety. (And, in case it needs to be said, I'm blogging this.) - Alex
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Alex Halavais -
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