Blog entry 5 on 21/3/17 LM111
In this weeks lecture and seminar the topic was Privacy in the networked society, and whether or not we have “the right to be alone” (Warren and Brandeis, Harvard Law Review, USA, 1890). Privacy is, according to Gavison “a measure of the access others have to you through information, attention and physical proximity” (Gavison, 1980 in boyd, 2014, p. 59). In this lecture, the overall impression I got was the fact that there is no more privacy in the networked society. This theory doesn’t give me reason to worry as I do not have anything to hide, and nothing as of yet has endangered me.
Maria let us listen to a brief segment of a BBC radio broadcast where an interviewer asked a woman at random if she was on Facebook, the woman replied “Yes”. She then asked the woman if she could have all of the contacts on her phone for £5. The woman replied “No.” When asked why she wouldn’t give them over she said “because they’re private”. This, shows the difference in privacy nowadays. On Facebook she would surely post images and posts including her friends, family and associates however wouldn’t give away their actual names or numbers.
We then went on to talk about how privacy is the default setting on all of us. Not so long ago you needed to be of high status or rich to have little privacy – but now we feel like that dynamic may have changed. I feel like anyone can become less private, or famous easily now because of social networking sites. “all web-accessible platforms, offer services, mostly social, in exchange for personal information. This simple step, taken by many, transforms our personal information into currency, and our privacy into a commodity” (Papacharissi, 2010).