When you use social media, who are you communicating with? And who else is paying attention? This chapter is about producing, consuming, and controlling online content. It’s also about the data, cultural norms, and terms of service that you create, accept, and influence.

Not “the public” – They’re publics, and they’re networked

Let’s go back to that ampitheater in Chapter 2. We envisioned an athlete on the ground, spewing insults about her opponent. (Yes, there were women athletes and gladiators in Ancient Rome.) I imagine the athlete shouting, “I say before the public that my opponent has the stench of a lowlife latrine!” And we have a mass of spectators roaring in approval, disapproval, excitement, laughter.

That mass of spectators is a public. The definition of a public is complicated (see danah boyd, It’s Complicated pp 8-9). But for simplicity’s sake I define a public as “people paying sustained attention to the same thing at the same time.”

When the gladiator calls the mass of spectators “the public” it deepens the effect of her insult to suggest that “everyone in the world” is watching. Although it is imaginary, “the public” is a powerful idea or “construct” that people refer to when they want to add emphasis to the effects of one-to-many speech. But really, there is no “the public.” There is never a moment when everyone in the world is paying sustained attention to the same thing at the same time. There only are various publics, overlapping each other, with one person potentially sharing in or with many different publics.

If you use social media, you interact with many publics that are connected to one another through you and likely through many others. Publics that intersect and connect online are “networked publics” (pg. 8.) In the terminology of social network analysis, whenever an individual connects two networked publics (or any two entities, such as two other people), that connector is called a bridge. Think about the publics you form a bridge between. How are you uniquely placed to spread information across multiple publics by forming bridges between and among them?

Bridging information between publics can be exciting, and controversial. Networked publics really work each other up, forming opinions, practices, and norms together. And they occasionally get in fights in the stands, clubbing each other with ancient Roman hot dogs and Syrian tabouleh.

Privacy Norms in Online Publics

​It is important to understand networked publics because they help us understand that the dichotomy of private vs public is an oversimplification of social relationships. ​When you post on social media, even if you post “publicly,” you probably envision certain people or publics as your audience.

Controlling the privacy of social media posts is much more complex than controlling the privacy of offline communication.

• On social media, as boyd notes, what you post is public by default, private by design (It’s Complicated, p. 61).
• Face-to-face, you can generally see who is paying attention and choose whether to speak to them, making your communications private by default, public by design. Note this is flipped from how it is on social media.

While popular media claim younger generations do not care about privacy, there is a great deal of evidence that youth care a lot about privacy and are developing norms to strategically protect it. Norms take time. There are norms that societies have developed over many centuries of face-to-face communication. These offline norms have long helped members of these societies get along with each other, and negotiate and protect their privacy. Let’s study one of these offline norms: civil inattention.

Civil inattention

It’s time to imagine an awkward face-to-face scenario, together. You’re in an eatery, which is bustling with people. You’re engaged in a conversation with two friends – and suddenly a passing stranger stops to lean over you and tries to join in your conversation. Another person from the next table over is also blatantly staring at you and your friends talking. You weren’t even talking to these people, and now they’re in your business!

That scenario is unlikely to happen in real life, because of a social norm sociologist Erving Goffman named civil inattention. In crowded spaces, civil inattention is the common understanding – by you and by others in that society – that you don’t get in other people’s business. You may acknowledge that you are sharing the space with them through small interactions, such as holding the door for the person behind you, making eye contact, and nodding or smiling. But you don’t stare, or listen in, or join in without an invitation.

So is civil inattention also an online norm? Well, that may depend on who we are and which publics we interact with online.

The online world is young, and norms in our networked publics are still being decided. Online norms are also dynamic, which means they are based on a changing set of deciders, including software developers and evolving publics of users. It could be that the most effective forms of privacy protection online will be based on social and cultural norms as we develop these.

But once we figure out what works in the online world in terms of privacy, we will have to articulate it – and then fight for it, because our data is immensely profitable for developers of the platforms we use.

Why privacy is such a tangled issue online

Privacy is a notion relating to self-determination that is too complicated to be reduced to one simple idea. Privacy can be defined in many ways – and so can invasion of privacy and its potential consequences. This is one of the reasons software companies’ Terms of Service or TOS are never adequate protections for users of their services. How do we demand protection of privacy when it is so multilayered and impossible to define?

Consider these two passages by Daniel Solove in his article, “Why Privacy Matters Even if you have Nothing to Hide.”

Privacy… is too complex a concept to be reduced to a singular essence. It is a plurality of different things that do not share any one element but nevertheless bear a resemblance to one another. For example, privacy can be invaded by the disclosure of your deepest secrets. It might also be invaded if you’re watched by a peeping Tom, even if no secrets are ever revealed.

Privacy, in other words, involves so many things that it is impossible to reduce them all to one simple idea. And we need not do so.

I agree with Solove that privacy is too complicated to be reduced to one simple idea. But often we are still called on to present a simplified definition of our privacy – for example, we have to justify why it is wrong to give companies such rampant uses of our data.

The value of human data

We are learning the hard way that we must fight for our privacy online. ​As an early leader in the social media platform market, Facebook set very poor standards for the protection of user privacy because access to personally identifiable user data was immensely profitable for the company. Before Facebook, it was standard for users of online sites to use avatars and craft usernames that didn’t connect to details of their offline lives.

Still, countless online sites permit or encourage users to create online identities apart from their face-to-face identities. Many of today’s younger internet users choose platforms with higher standards for privacy, limiting the publics that their posts reach and the periods of time that posts last. Youth frequently have “finsta” accounts – “fake” Instagrams that they share with nosy family and acquaintances, while only good friends and in-the-know publics have access to their “real” Instagrams. Practices like these force developers to offer users more control over user privacy and the reach of their posts, at the risk of losing users to competitors.

Users shape platforms and platforms shape user behavior. And social and cultural norms shape both user behavior and software platforms.

Related Content

Consider It: Cancel or Callout Culture

Cancel Culture: What value does it have? What limits must it have?

A popular topic at the time of this writing is cancel culture or callout culture, a collective attack built upon the practice of using social media to call people out for perceived wrongs. Cancel culture is arguably linked to positive social change, as Spencer Kornhaber asserts in the article linked below from the Atlantic. Yet as John Ronson shows in the NYTimes article linked below, cancel culture is also linked to devastating losses of employment and identity, and is sometimes directed at people who had little else of value in their lives.

Cancel culture is not good or bad. This is not a prompt to decide whether it is positive or negative. Read the two articles below and consider: How should cancel culture or a better version of it look, and where should it end, if it is has value in your society or culture? If you find it is not valuable, then when might it be valuable to use networked publics’ attention to stop people from doing harm online?

How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life from the New York Times

It’s Not Callout Culture. It’s Accountability from the Atlantic