paradoxes of privatization

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paradoxes of privatization
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modern life

• activity patterns, social networks, experiential
  ranges are scattered through space time
• communication and transportation technologies
  permit scattering and tie things together
• media assemble reassemble people's frameworks
  of knowledge action in space time
• experience becomes decentered and disjointed

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activity spaces (physical virtual)
Illustration of one persons daily activity space
by Mei-Po Kwan, Ohio State University http//geog
-www.sbs.ohio-state.edu/faculty/mkwan/WebCV/KwanWe
bCV.html
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blurring of public private

• private spaces link up with increasing number of
  public spaces
• public spaces become quasi-public, that is,
  privately owned and controlled

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elements of American culture (acc. to Zelinsky)

• intense, almost anarchistic individualism
• high valuation on mobility change
• mechanistic view of world
• messianic perfectionism
• All 4 link to the interest in mediated
  communication, but most subtle interesting
  links are to individualism.

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mediated life

• elements of individualism aggravated by media
• Insecurity
• ambition
• aggression
• Everything in the house accessible via remote
  control
• no public life, no sidewalks
• purified community (Sennett)
• protection of private property, avoidance of
  difference
• conspicuous consumption
• escape from real community

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public vs. private

• "Public" life
• living up to the images one sees every day on the
  media in private space time
• "Private" life
• paranoia produced by the inflated sense of
  threat and danger based in class and race myths
• inversion of the real and the unreal

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echoes of real life

• The Matrix technology run rampant, no privacy,
  constant mediation of experience
• Blade Runner manufactured identity, you are
  what you consume
• ER Friends search for community, belonging
  (making friends with other friends of Friends,
  online in 150 sites)
• Reality TV characters give up their privacy so
  viewers can lazily indulge their own desire for
  social disengagement

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instant friends
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do we envy their loss of privacy?
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foundations of privacy

• simulation technology marketing complete loss
  of the possibility of privacy (since privacy is
  founded on autonomy and on real public life)
• atomized TV audience
• one-way radial topology, greatest free-time use
  of time
• well-rounded image of others is inaccessible in a
  segmented society, so we accept a fabricated
  sense of knowing about those others
• lack of community is permitted and perpetuated by
  virtual friends

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an excess of privacy?

• As parents and communities "respect" kids'
  privacy they
• build armaments
• develop a taste for blood and guts
• lack real role models
• lack public spaces to build ties to adults
• eventually carry out savage attacks on classmates
  teachers

Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris the trenchcoat
mafia of Columbine High School
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Is IT a possible fix?

• situational segmentation (cocooning)
• spatial segmentation (rootlessness)
• fluid identity online withdrawal leads to new
  forms of engagement (coupled with vulnerability
  to surveillance)
• people become "digital individuals" (Curry)
  bought and sold by private companies
• the post-private individual, transparent but
  segmented a new Turing's man?