[Air-l] Re: ssage: an Ess-ian Q: when does the personal becomes public?

[Alex Halavais]

I have been intrigued by Barry's post and the responses that have
ensued. My first reaction (and I would be curious if others shared
this) was to ensure that I was not the culprit by doing a bit of
googling. I don't think I am the... is "collaborator" the appropriate
term ?... but the search did turn up a photograph of Barry on my blog,
identified by name:

http://alex.halavais.net/news/index.php?p=665  

There is some irony that the photograph is from a workshop in Toronto
on what Steve Mann has been calling "sousveillance." I find this use
of imaging and other recording materials by citizens to be less
liberating than he might find them. Yes, blogging, very broadly
defined, has the potential of making our social lives far more
transparent. I tend to think of this in a Brinian sense: the lesser of
two evils, and seemingly inevitable. I have no doubt that I blog in
the service of the secret and not-so-secret police of many nations. I
also blog in the service of the secret and not-so-secret
revolutionaries among us. And, heck, I'm also blogging for terrorism.
The surveillance I engage in is open to all, and while more daylight
can lead to sunburns, I think the benefits outweigh the potential
harm.

The kind of intrusions Barry is talking about are likely to lead to a
rethinking of what constitutes personal privacy. It's worth
remembering that the legal history of privacy in the US stems from
precisely the sort of complaint made here. That is, people were
sneaking cameras into private parties and publishing private
conversations in public newspapers. From a US-centric perspective, you
might go so far as to argue the combination of camera and penny-press
invented the idea of privacy as we generally think about it now. I
suspect that the cameraphone and blog will cause a similar shift.

I personally do what I can to guess at whether someone's comments are
"unbloggable." I think, like many, I follow a golden rule of blogging
(publicize not lest thee be publicized), with an added safety buffer
to account for my utter lack of shame. But an ethics of blogging will
only take us so far. The present state of social access to archived
life experience--and for me, cameraphones and other recording devices
are far more intrusive than relayed personal narrative--have already
changed how a large part of society interacts and expects to interact,
as danah has noted above. I think the important question now is
understanding how these boundaries are conceived within various
groups; that is, making the invisible assumptions of bloggers of
varying stripes more visible.

I have a feeling that the academic setting adds a slight twist. While
I might otherwise blog (or mention in a talk, etc.) an idea that I
heard from "some dude" at a dinner, it strikes me that as scholars we
have a special obligation to cite ideas that we may have gathered from
others, even when the source of such observations are not found in a
journal article. We have a particular difficulty when that obligation
potentially interferes with observing perceived social propriety.

(And, in case it needs to be said, I'm blogging this.) 

- Alex