Yesterday was one of the best days of my academic career, one that’s generally been pretty high-awesome. I had the privilege of spending the day with internet ethnography scholar Annette Markham and a group of ASU’s best grad students.
From attending a small workshop and a major talk, I got a sack of intellectual time bombs, and they’ve been going off one by one ever since. One blast comes from threads in her talk, and later audience discussion, about binary concepts of privacy and the decline of the “cyberspace” metaphor. I don’t know of anyone having linked them, but I think the connection’s strong.
One of Markham’s core points was that it’s not useful, methodologically or ethically, to think of information as having a binary state of public/private, but rather of privacy as being situational and contingent (I’d add, negotiated).
A questioner challenged that, saying, if you post a blog and don’t lock it, it’s public, and thus the content is fair game for any use because it’s not private anymore. I countered by mentioning my favorite law journal article, Warren & Brandeis‘s “The Right of Privacy,” from 1890, which is the source of American legal notions of privacy in the (first) age of social media. The example I gave was, I wear my face around in public. That doesn’t give you the right to use my face to sell your cars.
This is obvious, and it’s how we think about ownership generally. My phone is private. But if I lend it to (using examples from the audience) Megan to make a call, that doesn’t give Jeff the right to come over and take it from my bag: my lending it out hasn’t flipped the bit of its binary status from “private” to “public.”
Likewise, that license of use implicitly doesn’t extend to all my ownership rights: I can hit it with a baseball bat if I want, or run out the battery or rack up charges to 900-number sex lines – my license to Megan to borrow it (implicitly) doesn’t include those rights. If I’ve established a course of dealing of lending it to her, I may be implying a license to her to take it from my bag without asking – but that doesn’t mean the same license terms extend to Annette, because I lent it to her once. Specific negotiation and course of dealing over time are what determine the usage right, not some inherent property of the object.
Most school-age kids have developed an innate sense of this, even if they can’t articulate it in legal language 
But we think (thought) about digital information differently.
We’ve thought about digital information technologies differently anyway, all along, and it’s William Gibson and Neal Stephenson‘s fault.
There were a number of really interesting cultural/technological issues around the adoption of the telephone, but people never thought of people on the other end of a phone call as somehow not real, or phone numbers as an alternate identity, or of conversations happening in a “phone space” conceptually distinct from, and subject to different rules from, the “real world.” But we did all those things with respect to the internet, or as it was called till fairly recently, “cyberspace.” Why? Gibson and Stephenson.
Markham had a series of wonderful slides, of 1990s imaginings, and realities, of internet use: while we pictured avatarized landscapes of digital data in world-like spaces, we were largely interacting with each other via ASCII text on Usenet 
The disconnect between our concepts and our practices was immense.
“Cyberspace” is as extinct as the penny-farthing bicycle (and with it, frontier-manners socializing with strangers, social equality and solidarity, and immersive virtual worlds: I actually agree with Ted Castronova this time): researchers of the internet and cultural pundits need to recognize that the internet and its goods are no longer distinct from everyday life.
Stealing my shit, whether it’s my phone or a digital mask, or my savings account, is stealing. You don’t get to take my shit and use it for your own purposes without getting permission, and that permission isn’t generalizable. I’m me, but I don’t share everything with everybody (well, I pretty much do, but still).
The death of digital exceptionalism is, as a key quote in science and technology studies has it, “neither good nor bad, nor neutral.” It benefits the powerful at the expense of the powerless sometimes, but not at other times; it may have brought to an end one of the most powerful forces for good and bad in human history (very mostly good in my highly debatable opinion), the European-American escape valve and cultural mainspring of the “frontier.” It does end a godawful lot of silly talk and make laughable a bunch of 1990s sci-fi movies. It’s ended the “public” lives of a number of dear “pseudonymous” friends.
It’s a slap to the back of the head of punditry, scholarship, and particularly institutional ethical and methodological guidelines for studying human interaction involving the internet, some of which has barely started to come to grips with the internet’s existence, let alone with this second phase of its metaphorical conception.
Speaking of which, I’ve got to call out ASU’s anthropology department, the School of Human Evolution and Social Change (SHESC) that houses it, and the Ethnography Studio I’m a member of, all of which failed to send a single person to Markham’s workshop or talk. Four years ago, a senior administrator associated with SHESC declined an association with me and my work, saying that what I was doing as a first-year researcher was “ten years ahead of our faculty.” Four years later, they’re proving themselves to be still ten years behind the standard of practice. Shame on you all.
And, concomitant kudos to ASU’s English Department, and particularly its Rhetoric and Composition PhD program (and its exceptional students who I count as colleagues and friends), for recognizing that we live in the goddamned future and it matters.
Above all, thanks to Annette Markham for rocking our academic world.
