Re: [Air-L] Boyd: Facebook and ³radical transparency² (a rant)
yes, excellent indeed. May an interloping philosopher comment and then ask a question? (and then comment again, if anyone cares to read that far.)
From my perspective, much of this instantiates what I take to be Niel Postman's appropriation of Huxley, in contrast with Orwell: the shortest version of it I can come up with is, we fall in love with the technologies of our enslavement. (There's actually a nice reading of Postman's Foreword to his _Amusing Ourselves to Death_ on Youtube;: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMZejVltDDs&feature=related>, FWIW.) This critique is even easier to make in light of the early 2008 Guardian piece on the political and economic views of FB's founders (roughly, neo-conservative and "über-capitalist": <http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook>) Without developing this critique more fully here - one last bit of background to my question. Danah wants to focus more on choice and informed consent rather than privacy: The battle that is underway is not a battle over the future of privacy and publicity. It¹s a battle over choice and informed consent. I'd like a little clarification here - because I'm struggling to see how one can have meaningful choice and informed consent _without_ a strong realization of privacy? This isn't intended as a criticism of danah's most helpful and insightful comments. It's intended as an open and constructive request for clarification regarding what, in my view, may be a critical point. See further comment below, if interested.
many thanks in advance to anyone who might be able to shed light on this for me. - charles (As I have come to understand it, individual privacy is a core component of modern western views of the person as an entity capable of agency and genuinely free choice - which in turn is a primary legitimation of basic rights, including choice and informed consent, and thereby liberal / democratic states (where liberal = you get to choose your own best good in reflective and informed ways, rather than have it defined for you by family / clan / tribe / state). Habermas is helpful here - but so are Locke and Kant, as well as, e.g., some recent feminist takes on Kant. I recognize that individual privacy in the U.S. is encoded into law only with the Warren and Brandeis decision in the late 1800s and is affiliated with a conception of identity that many (but not all) feminists, post-modernists and post-structuralists sought to deconstruct and replace especially via hyertext and CMC affordances in the 1990s. It is further abundantly clear on both theoretical and empirical grounds that our engagements with CMC are accompanied by a shift from a sense of self / privacy as primarily individual to a sense of a relational self more interested in a small-group privacy - of the sort expressed by the teenage girl danah mentions. While there are numerous individual / social / ethical / political positives to this shift - my worry is that if we thereby forget these basic components of democratic / liberal societies , much less forget how to foster and sustain such agentic selves and their capacities for reflective choice (as facilitated by individual privacy), we are thereby likely to fall (perhaps happily) into the decidedly non-democratic / authoritarian / non-egalitarian regimes that are historically affiliated with such relational selves. FWIW: between more recent research in CMC that points to a "return" to something like the modernist self that largely went out the window in the 1990s, and seeing some ways in which different cultures seem to offer, in some cases, conceptual resources and real-world practices that sustain such a self - _alongside_ the more relational kind of self - I'm less worried than I used to be.) On 5/15/10 2:24 AM, "Richard Forno" <rforno@infowarrior.org> wrote:
Another worthwhile bit of commentary by danah.....
Facebook and ³radical transparency² (a rant)
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/05/14/facebook-and-radical-tr... sparency-a-rant.html _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
All, FYI: For those of you are interested and so inclined, the ACLU has a petition they plan to send to Facebook concerning their privacy (or lack therein) policy. http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/facebook-revolt-hand -TED On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 12:03 AM, Charles Ess <charles.ess@gmail.com> wrote:
yes, excellent indeed. May an interloping philosopher comment and then ask a question? (and then comment again, if anyone cares to read that far.)
From my perspective, much of this instantiates what I take to be Niel Postman's appropriation of Huxley, in contrast with Orwell: the shortest version of it I can come up with is, we fall in love with the technologies of our enslavement. (There's actually a nice reading of Postman's Foreword to his _Amusing Ourselves to Death_ on Youtube;: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMZejVltDDs&feature=related>, FWIW.) This critique is even easier to make in light of the early 2008 Guardian piece on the political and economic views of FB's founders (roughly, neo-conservative and "über-capitalist": <http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook>) Without developing this critique more fully here - one last bit of background to my question. Danah wants to focus more on choice and informed consent rather than privacy: The battle that is underway is not a battle over the future of privacy and publicity. It¹s a battle over choice and informed consent. I'd like a little clarification here - because I'm struggling to see how one can have meaningful choice and informed consent _without_ a strong realization of privacy? This isn't intended as a criticism of danah's most helpful and insightful comments. It's intended as an open and constructive request for clarification regarding what, in my view, may be a critical point. See further comment below, if interested.
many thanks in advance to anyone who might be able to shed light on this for me. - charles
(As I have come to understand it, individual privacy is a core component of modern western views of the person as an entity capable of agency and genuinely free choice - which in turn is a primary legitimation of basic rights, including choice and informed consent, and thereby liberal / democratic states (where liberal = you get to choose your own best good in reflective and informed ways, rather than have it defined for you by family / clan / tribe / state). Habermas is helpful here - but so are Locke and Kant, as well as, e.g., some recent feminist takes on Kant. I recognize that individual privacy in the U.S. is encoded into law only with the Warren and Brandeis decision in the late 1800s and is affiliated with a conception of identity that many (but not all) feminists, post-modernists and post-structuralists sought to deconstruct and replace especially via hyertext and CMC affordances in the 1990s. It is further abundantly clear on both theoretical and empirical grounds that our engagements with CMC are accompanied by a shift from a sense of self / privacy as primarily individual to a sense of a relational self more interested in a small-group privacy - of the sort expressed by the teenage girl danah mentions. While there are numerous individual / social / ethical / political positives to this shift - my worry is that if we thereby forget these basic components of democratic / liberal societies , much less forget how to foster and sustain such agentic selves and their capacities for reflective choice (as facilitated by individual privacy), we are thereby likely to fall (perhaps happily) into the decidedly non-democratic / authoritarian / non-egalitarian regimes that are historically affiliated with such relational selves. FWIW: between more recent research in CMC that points to a "return" to something like the modernist self that largely went out the window in the 1990s, and seeing some ways in which different cultures seem to offer, in some cases, conceptual resources and real-world practices that sustain such a self - _alongside_ the more relational kind of self - I'm less worried than I used to be.)
On 5/15/10 2:24 AM, "Richard Forno" <rforno@infowarrior.org> wrote:
Another worthwhile bit of commentary by danah.....
Facebook and ³radical transparency² (a rant)
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/05/14/facebook-and-radical-tr...
sparency-a-rant.html _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
_______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
-- Ted M. Coopman Ph.D. Lecturer Department of Communication Studies Department of Television, Radio, Film, & Theatre San Jose State University
participants (2)
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Charles Ess -
Ted Coopman