Civil Inattention
“Privacy is not in opposition to speaking in public. We speak privately in public all the time. Sitting in a restaurant, we have intimate conversations knowing that the waitress may overhear. We count on what Erving Goffman called “civil inattention”: people will politely ignore us, and even if they listen they won’t join in, because doing so violates social norms. Of course, if a close friend sits at the neighboring table, everything changes. Whether an environment is public or not is beside the point. It’s the situation that matters. “
Published in this month’s MIT Technology Review, Why Privacy Is Not Dead is a brief, albeit provocative piece on Internet privacy by social media researcher and Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society fellow Danah Boyd, who approaches the subject from the back end (a refreshing departure from the reactionary, technologically ignorant titters of the typical MSM front-page slog).
Another, equally incisive post by Boyd points to one of the more curious aspects of online interaction, social steganography, whereby the user speaks to various audiences by relying on others’ cultural fluency to parse multiple meanings from their messages. A seemingly-banal tweet about some pedestrian experience appears innocuous enough to the mom or boss trawling your Twitter feed; the wry observation won’t be lost, however, on those who are in the know about what really happened at that bar/party/opening/reading on Saturday night. People who are fiercely protective of their privacy, whether online or off, tend to excel at this form of double-speak, I think (er, know).
+ Why Privacy Is Not Dead (MIT Technology Review)
+ Social Steganography: Learning to Hide in Plain Sight (DMLcentral)
