Category Archives: New Media

digital media theory

Privacy

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Nobody likes to be told what to do. And nobody wants to be intruded upon. These feelings make privacy something to be valued and something that should be protected by law. We are all convinced that in some way autonomy, self-determination, and personal integrity are linked to and depend upon privacy. This is why Warren and Brandeis in their influential Harvard Law Review article of 1890 argued that there should be a “right to privacy” which in their view amounted to “the right to be left alone.” The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (G.A. res. 217A III) extended this right to all human beings: “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, not to attacks upon his honor and reputation.”

Both Warren and Brandeis and the UN knew that privacy was a tricky matter, a grey area, something that could not be easily defined. When it comes to taxation, military service, investigation of criminal acts, education, health care, financial credibility, and many many other social situations, whether we like it or not, we will be told what to do and we will be intruded upon; and no one can claim this amounts to a violation of their privacy. And if they do, then what counts before the law is whether or not an “expectation” of privacy can be considered “reasonable” and “legitimate.” Expectations of this sort vary from time to time, from culture to culture, and depend on many different factors. Above all, under today’s regime of Global, Mobile, Cloud, Apps, and Big Data most traditional expectations about privacy are obsolete and no longer based on the realities of the digital age.

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The Socio-Sphere

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The digital media revolution has largely made both the private sphere and the public sphere obsolete, or at least questionable, and has created a domain that is neither private nor public, a domain in which traditional forms of association, including politics, are being called into question.  Bruno Latour (Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) chooses not to use the terminology of modern social theory at all and speaks of the “collective,” a space of networks instead of a public sphere bound on the one side by a radically individualized privacy and on the other by hierarchical and oppressive social structures. Following Latour we propose dropping the categories of private and public and exchanging them for a new term, the socio-sphere. The socio-sphere is neither private nor public, but is based upon the new form of communication made possible by digital media, namely, “many-to-many” communication. The age old limitations on communication forcing it into either a one-to-one mode or into a one-to-many mode created a public sphere that was inherently contradictory. One-to-many communication disguised itself by means of the concept of representation and pretended to be one-to-one communication, that is, a form of communication in which all co-participate equally. The affordances of digital media create an entirely new form of communication capable of overcoming the limitations imposed upon communication since the beginnings of human history. This is what the technology does. The possibility of many-to-many communication brings with it the hope of resolving the contradiction of representation created by traditional media, namely, that one speaks for the many by means of speaking to the many.  In the wake of the digital media revolution the public sphere, and with it, the private subject of modernity, vanish into the socio-sphere. There is no longer anything like privacy and there is no longer a specifically public space.

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Mass Media, Representation, and Network Society

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The public sphere of modern bourgeois society is supposed to be the domain in which everyone can speak freely to everyone in order to reach consensus on matters of concern and on that basis coordinate cooperative action. The problem with this concept is that the spatial and temporal conditions of face-to-face interaction make it impossible for everybody to speak to everybody. Within the parameters of modernity this contradiction could not be resolved. The media, at first print media in the form of leaflets, newsletters, and newspapers, and then electronic broadcast media came to be the forms of communication structuring the public sphere. When private individuals came together to form a public, they lost their privacy and individuality and were transformed into anonymous masses. The defining characteristic of mass media is “that no interaction among those co-present can take place” (Luhmann). The private individuals of the public became the masses of the silent majority, who had restricted access to information and could therefore be manipulated by those in control of the media. Cooperative action was in reality not the outcome of one-to-one deliberation, but of one-to-many, hierarchical communication. No modern politician, businessperson, or scientist denies the power of the media, and no one who does not use the media effectively will gain and maintain political power, successfully market their products, or even get research grants. Modernity attempted to solve this problem by means of the concept of representation. Representation explains how democracy is possible under the conditions of the dichotomy between interaction and organization. Democratic process and the counting of votes became the mechanism of transforming one-to-one into one-to-many. Under the regime of the hierarchical one-to-many communciation, however, representatives could only speak for the people in the mode of speaking to the people.

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Layers and Filters

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In the wake of the digital revolution networking breaks out of traditional spatial and temporal limitations on access to information and cooperative action such that new and unforeseen possibilities emerge. Communication and action have traditionally been conditioned by spatial, temporal, and physical or bodily parameters. What could be perceived, known, and communicated and the conditions of action were determined largely by the physical “context,” the place and time where an actor was bodily present. Someone standing on a street corner in Lower Manhattan experiences a different world, has access to different information, and has different possibilities of action, then someone herding goats in the Pyrenees. The information available to these persons and the opportunities of action open to them is of course also determined by their education, the location of the nearest library, the available means of transportation, and the time, effort, and cost required to contact someone in order to get an answer to a question, initiate a financial transaction, coordinate cooperative action and so on. In the network society these spatial, temporal, and physical conditions are no longer the primary parameters of knowing and acting. Instead reality presents itself as a play of layers and filters.

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The Social Operating System

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Mixed reality (see post on Mixed Reality) describes a form of social and cultural evolution that merges digital technology with all aspects of life such that houses, workplaces, offices, schools, universities, libraries, public buildings, hospitals, indeed, entire cities including the complex systems of transportation, energy, logistics, and communication they depend upon become interfaces, that is, one great complex, automated information and communication system. Building the associations, enrolling the actors, translating their programs, navigating, managing, coordinating, and making use of this heterogeneous, hybrid network of humans and non-humans is the job of what may be called the social operating system. An operating system, such as Windows, iOS, or Linux is the key software of a computer. It enables and controls input and output devices, coordinates functions, guides processes, and monitors the operation of all elements of the complex hardware and the various applications that run on it. It holds the entire system together. The idea of a social operating system was made popular with the rise of Web 2.0 and what is called “social media.” It refers to the increasing dependence of almost all activities on digital information and communication and to the integration of technological systems into work, play, learning, health care, etc.

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