[Air-L] Boyd: Facebook and ³radical transparency² (a rant)

Ted Coopman ted.coopman at gmail.com
Sat May 15 12:31:49 PDT 2010


All,

FYI: For those of you are interested and so inclined, the ACLU has a
petition they plan to send to Facebook concerning their privacy (or lack
therein) policy.

http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/facebook-revolt-hand

-TED

On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 12:03 AM, Charles Ess <charles.ess at gmail.com> wrote:

> yes, excellent indeed.
> May an interloping philosopher comment and then ask a question? (and then
> comment again, if anyone cares to read that far.)
>
> >From my perspective, much of this instantiates what I take to be Niel
> Postman's appropriation of Huxley, in contrast with Orwell: the shortest
> version of it I can come up with is, we fall in love with the technologies
> of our enslavement.  (There's actually a nice reading of Postman's Foreword
> to his _Amusing Ourselves to Death_ on Youtube;:
> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMZejVltDDs&feature=related>, FWIW.)
> This critique is even easier to make in light of the early 2008 Guardian
> piece on the political and economic views of FB's founders (roughly,
> neo-conservative and "über-capitalist":
> <http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook>)
> Without developing this critique more fully here - one last bit of
> background to my question.  Danah wants to focus more on choice and
> informed
> consent rather than privacy:
> > The battle that is underway is not a battle over the future of privacy
> and
> > publicity. It¹s a battle over choice and informed consent.
> I'd like a little clarification here - because I'm struggling to see how
> one
> can have meaningful choice and informed consent _without_ a strong
> realization of privacy?
> This isn't intended as a criticism of danah's most helpful and insightful
> comments.  It's intended as an open and constructive request for
> clarification regarding what, in my view, may be a critical point.  See
> further comment below, if interested.
>
> many thanks in advance to anyone who might be able to shed light on this
> for
> me.
> - charles
>
> (As I have come to understand it, individual privacy is a core component of
> modern western views of the person as an entity capable of agency and
> genuinely free choice - which in turn is a primary legitimation of basic
> rights, including choice and informed consent, and thereby liberal /
> democratic states (where liberal = you get to choose your own best good in
> reflective and informed ways, rather than have it defined for you by family
> / clan / tribe / state).  Habermas is helpful here - but so are Locke and
> Kant, as well as, e.g., some recent feminist takes on Kant.
> I recognize that individual privacy in the U.S. is encoded into law only
> with the Warren and Brandeis decision in the late 1800s and is affiliated
> with a conception of identity that many (but not all) feminists,
> post-modernists and post-structuralists sought to deconstruct and replace
> especially via hyertext and CMC affordances in the 1990s.
> It is further abundantly clear on both theoretical and empirical grounds
> that our engagements with CMC are accompanied by a shift from a sense of
> self / privacy as primarily individual to a sense of a relational self more
> interested in a small-group privacy - of the sort expressed by the teenage
> girl danah mentions.
> While there are numerous individual / social / ethical / political
> positives
> to this shift - my worry is that if we thereby forget these basic
> components
> of democratic / liberal societies , much less forget how to foster and
> sustain such agentic selves and their capacities for reflective choice (as
> facilitated by individual privacy), we are thereby likely to fall (perhaps
> happily) into the decidedly non-democratic / authoritarian /
> non-egalitarian
> regimes that are historically affiliated with such relational selves.
> FWIW: between more recent research in CMC that points to a "return" to
> something like the modernist self that largely went out the window in the
> 1990s, and seeing some ways in which different cultures seem to offer, in
> some cases, conceptual resources and real-world practices that sustain such
> a self - _alongside_ the more relational kind of self - I'm less worried
> than I used to be.)
>
>
> On 5/15/10 2:24 AM, "Richard Forno" <rforno at infowarrior.org> wrote:
>
> > Another worthwhile bit of commentary by danah.....
> >
> > Facebook and ³radical transparency² (a rant)
> >
> >
> http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/05/14/facebook-and-radical-tran
> > sparency-a-rant.html
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-- 
Ted M. Coopman Ph.D.
Lecturer
Department of Communication Studies
Department of Television, Radio, Film, & Theatre
San Jose State University



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