Civilization and its disconnects:

Privacy, publicity and electronic media

Dr David PatmanUniversity of Melbourne

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Overview• Privacy versus publicity

• Historical, cultural, psychoanalytic perspectives

• McLuhan and media effects

• Privacy in tribal, industrial and electronic media cultures

• Media containers and media content

• Future possibilities for media and psychoanalysis

• Social media as symptom

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Privacy vs Publicity• A central dilemma for users of electronic

communications technology.

• Some feel that electronic media are intruding into our lives - CCTV, television, mobile phones, email.

• Yet, many people seem prepared to share the most personal (and often most mundane) aspects of their lives via social media.

• For other users this too can feel like an annoying invasion of ‘personal’ space.

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Why I gave up Facebook

“Online, social networks instruct us to share whenever there's 'something on our mind', no matter how ignorant or ill considered, and then help us broadcast it to the widest possible audience. Every day each of us is bombarded by other people's random thoughts. We start to see such effusions as natural.”

Sherry Turkle, Alone Together)

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Over-sharing is NSFW

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Social media management is big

business“Social media offers tempting opportunities to interact with employees, business partners, customers, prospects and a whole host of anonymous participants on the social Web…However, those who participate in social media need guidance from their employer about the rules, responsibilities, 'norms' and behaviors expected of them” (Gartner, Seven Critical Questions to Ask Before Developing a Social Media Policy, 2011)

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"Publication is a self-invasion of

privacy"In a society which appears to place such a high value on privacy and the protection of personal information, why is that so many people seem willing, if not eager, to publicly share intimate details of their private lives via social media?

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A (very) brief history of privacy

• Property: Physical space can be owned by private individuals emerged with English Enclosure Acts in 1700s – removed access to ‘the commons’ and assigned to private landowners. Laws to protect the ‘right to be let alone’ (e.g. Fourth Amendment)

• Personal: Parts of the body that might be ‘private’ (and indecent, offensive or shameful) a feature of ‘civilized’ society. Protected by architecture, clothing, manners, some decency laws.

• Both depend on the ability to define and control access across a boundary - associated with ‘power’

• Violation of boundary between public and private evokes anxiety, outrage and moral panic: felt to be unlawful, improper, indecent, pathological (e.g.‘exhibitionism’ and ‘voyeurism’)

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Privacy across cultures

• No agreed definition – from Latin privatus – to separate/deprive

• No word for privacy in some languages (e.g. Russian).

• Public toilets and public hospitals in China really are ‘public’

• In medieval Europe, the poor lived together in one room

• Privacy associated with phonetic literacy

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Information privacy

“Instantaneous photographs and newspaper enterprise have invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life; and numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that ‘what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the house-tops’” Warren and Brandeis, Harvard Law Review (1891)

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Information privacy

• Concept relatively new - emerged in response to ‘yellow journalism’ based on telegraphic wire services which deliver information instantaneously

• Focus of present day privacy statutes

• Extends principles of private property to idea that we should have rights over information about us

• Various statutes to protect information: mail tampering, surveillance, identity fraud, government records, intellectual property

• Also extended to unsolicited information entering private realm that might be offensive or dangerous, e.g. Spam

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Privacy - game over?

"If you have something you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place"

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google

"The age of privacy is over"

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and founder of Facebook

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Privacy and psychoanalysis

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Privacy and psychoanalysis

“Some say [loss of privacy] is a nonissue; they point out that privacy is a historically new idea. This is true. But although historically new, privacy has well served our modern notions of intimacy and democracy. Without privacy, the borders of intimacy blur. And, of course, when all information is collected, everyone can be turned into an informer”

Sherry Turkle, Alone Together

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Privacy and psychoanalysis

• Norman Holland: The pseudonymity of identity protects users from real consequences, encouraging over-sexualized and overly aggressive behavior (flirting and flaming) – ‘the internet regression’

• Sherry Turkle: The ability to ‘broadcast the self’ lures one into narcissistic self-absorption. We become dependent on our devices. Virtual, machine-mediated relationships become substitutes for the real thing – users are ‘alone together’.

• Bonnie Litowitz: Electronic media undermines authority, giving the pleasure principle free rein – the return of the repressed.

• Aaron Balick: Permanence and hyper-availability of searchable data on people disrupts stable sense of self - 'virtual impingement'.

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Privacy and psychoanalysis

• Common theme is regression

• There are cases of dependence, obsession, ‘cyber-bullying’ and other pathological behavior online

• But also cases where the internet has been used creatively (e.g. sharing knowledge, building virtual communities, taking collective action, peaceful revolution – see Philip Boxer and Clay Shirky)

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McLuhan and media effects

“The printing press, the computer, and television are not ... simply machines which convey information. They are metaphors through which we conceptualize reality in one way or another. They will classify the world for us, sequence it, frame it, enlarge it, reduce it, argue a case for what it is like. Through these media metaphors, we do not see the world as it is. We see it as our coding systems are. Such is the power of the form of information.”

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding media

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McLuhan and media effects

• Mental life has its origins interplay of material deriving from the physical senses (e.g. Beta elements?)

• We have a ‘sensory ratio’ – when one sense is stimulated, the others are dulled (e.g. dentists use ‘audiac’ as anaesthetic)

• Media extend and amplify the physical senses. If one sense is stimulated or flooded, the others are dulled to ‘unconsciousness’ (e.g. as in hypnosis, or sleep)

• The sensory ratio – and therefore experience - in any society is related to its media mix

• Media are the means of reproduction of particular 'ways of being'

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Audio-tactile immersion in the collective mind • Media: speech, songs, dreams, dance, touch (grooming)

• Images and words have magical resonant quality

• Experience is immersive, everyone involved with everyone else (village)

• Communal rather than individual identity

• Space is 'acoustic' (surround) - motif is mosaic

• Time cyclic rather than linear

• Common areas, but no privacy as we know it

• Associated with ‘tribal’ cultures, primitive - like Ba group?

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Visual culture and civilized society

• Media: written and printed word

• Phonetic alphabet splits meaning from symbols

• Experience is split into public and private domains, subject and object

• Individual subjects with 'points of view', related to each other through systems, specialist roles, institutions, laws

• Space is 'optic' (directional, individual-centric) - motif is hierarchy

• Time is uniform and sequential

• Associated with civil society, rationality, science

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Visual culture and civilized society

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The privatized self - alone together

• “Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor”

• The main effect of print technology, according to McLuhan, is to split off the 'public individual' as a distinct, and self-aware entity.

• Private individuals relate to each other through logic and rationality and, together, constitute a kind of social machine.

• However, for the components of the machine to work in harmony, the messy parts of experience (associated with sound, touch, taste and smell) must be split off into an area which can't be seen - the realm of the 'private’.

• Civilization enacts a kind of repression

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Electronic tribes and the global village

• McLuhan: The speed of electricity extends the whole central nervous system outside the body

• Electric media are reversing the process of splitting enacted by visual culture, returning us to audio-tactile culture

• Begun with telegraph and telephone, amplified by radio and TV

• The motif is again the mosaic (or matrix): the organic web as opposed to the mechanical system

• Parallel with difference between classical and quantum physics

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Electronic tribes and the global

village

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Electronic tribes and the global village

•OMG she got FB frnds tatts on hr arm LOL

•WTF?? :0

• asdkfdksdhslk!!!

•HAHA Pwned :-)

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Media containers and content

• “Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which we communicate than by the content of the communication” (e.g. electric light)

• Media are containers for the externalization (‘extension’) of parts of the self

• These parts (‘content’) are misrecognized (‘repressed) as ‘other’ in a kind of projective identification

• Media content exerts a narcissistic fascination which blinds us to the unconscious effects of the medium itself

• The internet is the medium - social media is one aspect of its content

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Social media is content

The internet is the medium

• The internet allows people to be involved in each others lives (as do other electronic media such as TV, radio, the telephone).

• Fast networks, cheap memory, increased processing power have sped up this involvement

• Social media are like TV programs on the internet – they offer a kind of ‘plot structure’

• Structure is often consistent with the patterns of the old print-based media (e.g. Facebook timeline is like 'sands through the hourglass')

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Future possibilities• “If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair,

ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch”

• Psychoanalysis adopted on the cusp of the electronic age.

• Consulting room restores the auditory (speech) and tactile (couch) qualities of experience. The analyst provides an imagined and responsive audience for the 'user's' emotional projection/communications.

• Perhaps Internet users seeking a parallel experience through social media - to get back in touch with split off parts of the self?

• Can we discover a form of electronic media which offers a parallel opportunity for collective reflection on, and reconnection with, what has been repressed by ci-visualization?

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The interpretation of memes

• Patterns and rhythms in internet content which express and amplify shared feelings and preoccupations

• These are magnified or amplified through content which goes viral, or becomes a 'meme'. (e.g. Lolcats)

• These have meaning and can provide insight into social dynamics of our era (similar to Beradt’s 3rd Reich of dreams)

• e.g. 'binders full of women' – tells us something about Romney but also about ourselves

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Social media as symptom

• "Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools and yesterday's concepts"

• Mismatch between Industrial Age organization rules and structures and new electronic environment - focus of group relations?

• Opportunity to use electronic media as a tool for self-reflection - like a Listening Post

• Use of social media at work (in ways which seem damaging rather than productive) highlight a point at which the organization has been unable to provide requisite containment

• Defence is to shut down, make more repressive rules - can we help build more reflective cultures?

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