I have been struggling with the implications of the somewhat popular rebellion of Facebook users to the changes in privacy settings several weeks back, and on privacy in general. Privacy in an attention economy if fraught, as people seek publicity and community, but want to maintain privacy, a feat which has always been hard, but becomes much more difficult as the ground shifts beneath our feet.
I recently ran across Jonathan Franzen’s 1998 essay on privacy “Imperial Bedrooms” and was struck by some of the similarities of his account of privacy and the current debate about facebook. In the essay, Franzen is talking about Ashcroft’s invasion of privacy and the simultaneous uproar and lack of real concern. People aren’t really all that concerned with privacy, he says. . We increasingly bring our private lives into the public sphere via cell phones and other media, and our obession with television speaks to a yearning for an end to privacy, at least for celebrities, and insofar as we want to become celebrities. The extent to which we bring the private into the public shows how we value and view privacy. Franzen is not as interested in the private sphere as the public: “”what’s threatened…isn’t the private sphere. It’s the public sphere” (481). The commons is not a place of communal activity, but a lot of private bubbles that spill over into those of others.
“[T]he networked world…ugly spectacle of privacy triumphant” (50) What is facebook, then, but a private public sphere (or a public private sphere?). On Facebook, we broadcast some what,at one time would have been the most private details of our lives to the world, depending on our ever-shifting privacy settings. In other words, we input personal details into a corporate-owned database, in exchange for a a sort of community, however we choose to define that through our friend-adding and privacy-setting practices. I understand the outrage when those settings get unilaterally changed, but do we expect anything better or different, and do we pay attention to those settings in the first place?
How can we expect privacy or get outraged in the inevitable event when facebook decides to sell our information to advertisers? Facebook is out to make money, and their product is our information.2 Put differently, we are facebook’s product, not its customers.
Many have no conception of the potential audience of our online activities, nor of the longevitiy of these posts, and many, for better or worse, don’t care. Franzen’s assertion that the public sphere is in danger takes on new light when we think of social networking sites, which might be thought of as new public spheres, except that they are, in the main, privately owned, much like shopping malls.
In an attention economy privacy is poverty. Instead of asking how much privacy we should be able to expect, we might ask how much we really want?
- from How to Be Alone essay anthology [↩]
- as a side note, what is it about advertisers, anyway, that causes such revolt? Shouldn’t we be happy that our ads are getting more targeted to our perpetually insatiable desires? [↩]
