Networked privacy is the desire to maintain agency over information within the social and technological networks in which information is disclosed, given meaning, and shared. This agency is continually compromised by the aggregation, connection, and diffusion facilitated by social media and big data technologies. In this talk, drawing from her book The Private is Political, Marwick examines how these dynamics map to intersectional lines of privacy, drawing from a study of LGBTQ+ individuals in North Carolina.
Because networked information intrinsically leaks, the participants strategized how to manage disclosures that might be stigmatized in one context but not in others. They worked to firewall what, how, and to whom they disclosed, engaging in privacy work to maintain agency over information. They do not navigate the idea of private and public as a binary but as a spectrum, a web, or a network. Their experiences complicate the idea of a binary distinction between “public” or “private” information. Instead, the ways people share information about stigmatized identities are deeply contextual and social.
Alice E. Marwick is the Director of Research at the Data and Society Research Institute, Research Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, and a Senior Faculty Researcher at the Center for Information, Technology and Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She researches the social, political, and cultural implications of social media technologies. Marwick is the author of The Private is Political: Networked Privacy on Social Media (Yale, 2023), Media Manipulation & Disinformation Online (Data & Society 2017), Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity and Branding in the Social Media Age (Yale 2013), and co-editor of The Sage Handbook of Social Media (2017). She is a former Andrew Carnegie Fellow and was the 2023-2024 Microsoft Visiting Professor at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University.
Sponsoring Organization(s)
Information Society Project (ISP)