Abstract
In the debate, around the social norm of pricavy (which Facebook founder Zuckerberg proclaimed to be overcome) many theorists consent that privacy is already an illusion and that we stand at the beginning of a “transparency society”. In surveillance-critical discourses, privacy is seen as alarmingly suppressed and displaced by an all-embracing visibility contributing to a highly problematic, repressive development that endangers political and social life. Interestingly, there is a as yet academically little-addressed narrative that looks upon the transparency society favorably by celebrating the transparency of individuals as an emancipatory advancement. In the German context, Christian Heller for instance argues for a transparency utopia where the private is to be absorbed by the public domain. Post-privatism identifies social web practices of self-determined self-disclosure, self-thematization, and the expanding confessional culture as a chance for a liberating open community of transparency, able to realize feminists demand of the abolition of the private sphere and to provide a stage for the formerly marginalized and suppressed “private”. In this article, the assumption of a utopian “transparency society” is examined more closely by means of differentiating the notion of ‘transparency’. The supposed alliance of post-privatism and the feminist anti-privacy movement is questioned by adressing the relation of visibility and transparency and their relationship with emancipation. It will be asked, whether the steps towards post-privacy in an ICT-mediated society can, and should be seen as steps away from discrimination and oppression. Touching the debate around a so-called digital public sphere, this article suggests a feminists critique of the “transparency society”.
All German quotes translated by myself.
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Notes
- 1.
I want to distance myself from any ableist connotations. Visibility can also be understood as perceptibility in general. Following discourses in which “visibility” is an established conceptualization, I will stick to this denomination.
- 2.
In how far the post-privacy arguments live up to the designations “theory” or “movement” is debatable. I will mainly focus on the theoretical parts thereof and will refer to the discourse in a broader sense as “post-privatism”.
- 3.
The term “information communication technologies” refers to an association of the fields of information technology (IT) and telecommunications (TC) and refers to the merging of computers and software on the one hand and of telephone connections and wireless signals on the other. This connection between traditional computer-based technologies and digital communication technologies here refers especially to the internet.
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Schröder, J.V. (2019). Feminist Post-Privacy? A Critique of the Transparency Society. In: Loh, J., Coeckelbergh, M. (eds) Feminist Philosophy of Technology. Techno:Phil – Aktuelle Herausforderungen der Technikphilosophie, vol 2. J.B. Metzler, Stuttgart. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04967-4_11
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