19 Privacy and/in the Public Sphere (original) (raw)
Related papers
Immunity from the image: The right to privacy as an antidote to anonymous modernity
Being unidentifiable and untraceable to state or corporate apparatuses of surveillance and control today has become almost synonymous with being anonymous. It is in this capacity that anonymity is often understood as instrumental and conducive to citizens' personal privacy vis-à-vis said apparatuses. Yet there is another sense to anonymity less immediately aligned with or intelligible within these privacy-centric narratives. In the motto that epitomizes the liberatory role attributed to online anonymity in early net culture ('On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog'), anonymity designates a particular mode of sociality and culture that is impersonal or even anti-personal, ephemeral, collective, authorless and in that sense 'nameless' and 'faceless'. Today, imageboards like 4chan continue to cultivate and embrace anonymity in this sense, as a mediatic condition post-humaine. The article aims to show that these forms of anti-and impersonal media prosumption have their roots in a more encompassing tradition of popular mass media culture, against which the right to privacy was originally asserted. As a value, privacy is linked to class-specific anxieties over the increasingly anonymous and impersonal forces of mass modernity and its new media publics, whose profane curiosity desired to 'bring things closer' by means of their technological reproduction. The emergent mass culture threatened dominant bourgeois values of personal autonomy and selfhood historically and culturally implied in the idea of a right to privacy. The resulting understanding of anonymity and its relation to privacy suggests an alternative perspective on what is at stake in the politics of online anonymity today.
The transformation of privacy and anonymity: Beyond the right to be let alone
Sociological imagination, 2003
Privacy and anonymity as values were once more closely associated with solitude and even hermitage than with active social existences. However, these values are taking on new significance in an age of the Internet; they are becoming more tightly linked with matters of identity ...
Anonymity and its Prospects in the Digital World
In this working paper I will trace the changes undergone by anonymity – and by the discourses surrounding it – in liberal Western societies. I will ask whether the current politicization of the issue is likely to have any impact on the gradual disappearance of opportunities for anonymity that we are currently witnessing and argue that anonymity is an ambivalent but critical feature of the democratic public sphere. The argument proceeds in three stages. I begin with a number of conceptual observations on anonymity. From these, a heuristic framework emerges with which the changes in anonymous communication, and in the role this communication plays in society, can be described. I then analyse the extent to which options for anonymity have been affected by the revolution in information and communication technologies and conclude by considering how anonymity is framed in public discourse and what impacts this has.
Internet Policy Review, 2019
This contribution provides a short introduction into the conceptual and socio-technical development of privacy. It identifies central issues that inform and structure current debates as well as transformations of privacy spurred by digital technology. In particular, it highlights central ambivalences of privacy between protection and de-politicization and the relation of individual and social perspectives. A second section connects these issues to the influential texts and discussions on digital privacy. In particular, we will demonstrate privacy in digital societies is to be conceived in a novel way, since contemporary socio-technical conditions unsettle central assumptions of established theories: forms of perceptions, social structure or individual rights. Thus, a final third paragraph summarises theoretical innovations triggered by this situationespecially research from computer science to the social sciences and law and philosophy highlighting the requirement to take groups, social relations and broader socio-cultural contexts into account.
"We are Anonymous." Anonymity in the Public Sphere – Challenges of Free and Open Communication
2013
Anonymity, the stealth mode of public communication, challenges different actors who deal with freedom of communication issues in their day to day life-be it professional journalists, information and communication scientists, technicians or political activists. This article aims to deliver theoretical background on the concept of anonymity on the macro-level, as well as to shed light on how different communicators deal with anonymity on the micro-level. Based on the example of the Anonymous movement, communicative actions are put in relation to media technological artifacts and their surrounding media environment with a focus on journalistic practice and public response to the phenomenon. The analysis concludes with the need for a preservation of options for anonymous public communication as a dimension of freedom of communication after carefully considering both the advantages and the potential risks connected to that mode of private-public communication.
Forthcoming in The Social Dimensions of Privacy, eds. Beate Roessler and Dorota
2014
Must privacy and freedom of expression conflict? To witness recent debates in Britain, you might think so. Anything other than self-regulation by the press is met by howls of anguish from journalists across the political spectrum, to the effect that efforts to protect people’s privacy will threaten press freedom, promote self-censorship and prevent the press from fulfilling its vital function of informing the public and keeping a watchful eye on the activities and antics of the powerful.[Brown, 2009, 13 January]1 Effective protections for privacy, from such a perspective, inevitably pose a threat to democratic government via the constraints that they place on the press. Such concerns with privacy must be taken seriously by anyone who cares about democratic government, and the freedom, equality and wellbeing of individuals. But if it is one thing to say that privacy and freedom of expression cannot always be fully protected, it is another to suppose that protections for the one must ...
Privacy in public and the contextual conditions of agency
Privacy in Public Space - Conceptual and Regulatory Challenges , 2017
As traditional public spaces rapidly change the question arises whether pervasive surveillance is actually compatible with the nature of individual agency. It is known that new and largely unregulated technologies often both erode old de facto limitations of access, and erect new asymmetric barriers of knowledge, but how should we understand the harms of these new contexts? Based on our psychological and biological knowledge of social perception, embodiment and action choice it seems that these conditions present a toxic mix for our ability to gauge what I call our " relational privacy " , and thereby for our autonomous and purposeful action planning. If this functional analysis is right then boundless surveillance of our bodies and behaviors threatens rather than supports basic personal freedom and responsibility. However, in contrast to this analysis, the private-public dichotomy often implied in existing debates assumes that privacy concerns can be theorized without much attention to the functional and relational dynamics of our embodied agency. Building on among others Nissenbaum and Reidenberg's work, this chapter seeks to counter this tendency. Two conclusions stand out: Firstly, it seems that our action choices depend on the existence of limited contexts also in public, and thus actions in what we might term " unbounded contexts " are typically performed through some kind of denial. Secondly, abundant availability of data traceable to persons can not only undermine and coerce our choices, but even to a large extent completely bypass our current volitional action choices. Thus it seems that the contextual nature of our agency should be of utmost importance to political and legal privacy issues, and could usefully guide attempts to recreate more bounded public spaces.
Anonymity from Pre-Modern to Contemporary Form
Anonymity is as old as social relationships themselves but with the cultural, economic and technological changes in the society, experience of anonymity has also transformed. Through these changes, developments in media have a key role which may define the conditions of anonymity. The conditions of anonymity are defined in the power relations of the original content creator (author, radio/TV host, user etc.) and the intermediary institution in the communication axis. With emergence of new media and social media, new conditions in anonymous interactions have also been emerged. With the increased volume of user generated content, the power of the original content creator and the possibility of sharing identity information has increased. On the other hand users have different alternatives to enjoy anonymity. In this study, it is aimed to review anonymity with social media. As a case, Facebook is critically analyzed to show how anonymity could be reconsidered with the possibilities Facebook' s structure offer.
Introduction to Privacy Online
Even before the various networks supporting online communication converged as the Internet, tensions existed between users' desires to communicate online in very personal ways and their assumptions that their disclosures would or should be treated as privileged and private. These tensions have not abated with the advent of social media. Just as it was with the most bare-bones, text-based online communities of the past, it is with contemporary media: The more users disclose of themselves, the more they may enjoy the benefits these systems have to offer. At the same time, the more they disclose, the more they risk what they themselves consider breaches of their privacy. In light of this ongoing issue, this volume is not only timely in the manner in which it addresses these tensions as they are manifest in contemporary social media platforms, it also contributes to a tradition of research on the dualism of privacy, privilege, and social interaction that online communication has incurred as far back as (or farther than) the advent of the Internet itself.