Alice Marwick joined the New Books Network’s podcast on Science, Technology, and Society to talk about The Private is Political. She talked about networked privacy with host Jake Chanenson, who also asked about the feminist history of privacy covered in the book.
The legal concept of privacy traces its roots to an 1890 Harvard Law Review article by future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and Samuel D. Warren. Drawing on work by Dr. Anita L. Allen, The Private is Political explores how that concept relies on gendered notions of separate private and public spheres. As Alice summarized it on the podcast:
I was really inspired when I read Anita Allen's original piece “How Privacy Got Its Gender”, which looks at how one of the most cited law review articles of all time, “The Right to Privacy,” the Brandeis article. And this article is very much steeped in sort of what we might think of as Gilded Age norms, where there was a upper-middle-class ideal of the private sphere and the public sphere that was very gendered. It was rooted in the cult of true womanhood, which was, again, an upper-middle-class, white, obviously Northeastern ideal that women were the guardians of the domestic sphere of the home, that they held on to morality, that they were responsible for inculcating their husbands and children into this morality.
But as part of that, they weren't supposed to participate in public life. So what Anita Allen does in her piece is she shows how these gendered norms played really deeply into the Brandeis piece and the modern concept of the right to privacy. And that when we think about who is entitled to privacy, it was people who were moving from the domestic sphere into the public sphere, which was men. And again, these norms are really specific. People of color, women of color, and white women have very different expectations of privacy in the public and private spheres. Even for white women, if they were ensconced in the home, that home could be a place of surveillance, it could be a place of abuse, it could be a place where they didn't enjoy “a man's home is his castle,” this idea of ultimate privacy. A lot of people are surveilled and watched within their houses. And at the time, even though there were lots of women like domestic workers and women who worked in factories and things like that, for upper middle-class women, there was this assumption that you didn't work outside the home. And so there wasn't access to the public sphere.
By breaking all of this down, we see that a lot of the early privacy legislation was really concerned with a violation of genteel women's privacy. It was about “should portraits of women be used on advertising,” “can newspapers print pictures of socialites,” things like that. And what you end up seeing is that some of the earliest privacy legislation is supposed to protect the gentility and domesticity of women. But there were a lot of very innovative, perhaps, or spirited women who did not live their life in adherence to these norms, who were able to sort of use those stereotypes to their own benefit by saying, “well, look, I am a modest woman, you can't use my visage in in this product, because it would violate my modesty,” even if really, they didn't want it done for a variety of other reasons. And I think that these gendered and racist assumptions about privacy have continued through the ages, even as our conceptions of privacy has changed.
Publications and appearances
“The dead make up a surprisingly large portion of the internet’s population — on Facebook alone, dead users are expected to outnumber the living by 2070. But the internet is not designed for them.” Affiliate Gabriel Nichols reviewed Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond for the Washington Post.
“Full-semester “journalism and democracy” courses are offered at a few well-established journalism schools. But smaller journalism programs — particularly at state-supported schools and community colleges — are struggling to support just basic journalism courses these days. The Democracy Infusion Project is designed especially to reach those schools, overloaded faculty and brand-new adjuncts. The lessons and assignments can be incorporated into any media course — sports reporting, magazine editing, photojournalism and more.” Affiliate Tamar Wilner is a co-author of the Democracy Infusion Project curriculum for journalism programs.
Opportunity
Affiliates Meredith Pruden and Jo Lukito are among the editors for a special issue of Political Communication on Multi-Platform Research. Read the full call and submit your extended abstract by September 25.
Coming soon
August 19th at ASA: CITAP is hosting a reception along with CITAMS and Disability in Society at the ASA conference on Sat, August 19th.
Also at ASA: Francesca Tripodi will speak a panel on public sociology and digital technology alongside Alex Hanna, Khari Johnson, Nanjala Nayabola, and Joan Donovan on August 20.
August 30 at APSA: CITAP is co-hosting the APSA Pre-Conference in Political Communication: The Age of Misinformation.
✨NEW DETAILS: September 7 at 3pm CITAP is hosting Lee McGuigan for a book talk on his book “Selling the American People: Advertising, Optimization, and the Origins of Adtech.” In the Freedom Forum and via livestream: details and RSVP.
🚨REGISTRATION NOW OPEN: October 16 at CITAP We’re hosting the Misinformation and Marginalization Symposium. How does misinformation circulate in marginalized communities, and what misinformation narratives are shared about marginalized groups?
Featuring a keynote from Dr. Sarah Banet-Weiser and panels on misinformation and gender & sexuality; diasporic communities; and algorithmic amplification, race, and religion. Free registration required to join in person or virtually!
October 18 at AoIR: Alice Marwick, Yvonne Eadon, and Rachel Kuo are among the co-organizers of an AoIR preconference on future of conspiracy.
October 22 at the Annenberg Public Policy Center: The Post-API Conference.
🌟 REGISTRATION NOW OPEN: November 10: A symposium on Religion, Media, and Public Life.
Confirmed panelists include Whitney Phillips, Samuel Perry, Eden Constentein, Xavier Pickett, Erika Gault, and Heidi Campbell, with additional participants to be named in the weeks to come. Register to join in person or virtually!
Rest of Web
We’re reading this paper on how race and gender affect perceptions of incivility and how that shapes content moderation practices on social media.
“Researchers — including many women of color — have been saying for years that these systems interact differently with people of color and that the societal effects could be disastrous: that they’re a fun-house-style distorted mirror magnifying biases and stripping out the context from which their information comes; that they’re tested on those without the choice to opt out; and will wipe out the jobs of some marginalized communities.” Rolling Stone profiles Timnit Gebru, Rumman Chowdhury, Safiya Noble, Seeta Peña Gangadharan, and Joy Buolamwini—the researchers who’ve been identifying the real, concrete issues with AI for some time now.