Chapter 17

Publicized privacy

Social networking and the compulsive search for limits

John Sloop and Joshua Gunn

Drawing on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s (2000) account of the shift from a disciplinary society to the society of control, Jodi Dean offers a provocative explanation of contemporary public behavior (2009, p. 65). Given some of the symptoms of the shift described by Hardt and Negri – a dissolution of the nuclear family, unions, schools, neighborhoods, and the rise of virtualities that create fluid, hybrid, and mobile imaginary identities – Dean finds contemporary subjects who increasingly lack self-control, “in part because they lack a strong sense of self that arises through discipline, and … look outside themselves for some authority to impose control” (ibid., p. 66). In short, as material and cultural changes have effectively lessened the skill/need of individuals to self-discipline, they have a compulsion to seek external control for understanding the limits of behavior and identity.

It is an intriguing thesis, to be sure, one that frightens while simultaneously forcing “we critics” to rethink strategies crafted – at least one chapter – when Foucault’s description of the disciplinary society was at its high water mark. As if Foucault’s understanding of the cultural condition was not horrific enough, the move toward a society of control puts something of an end to the optimism cultural critics had fantasized as the “age of the Internet” and material changes it wrought. Here instead, Dean’s reading of Hardt and Negri would have us understand that, within the grooves of the changes wrought by current material conditions, individual subjects, rather than seeking libratory identity changes on their own – something hinted at by Hardt and Negri – pursue external punishment or control that tells them “how to behave” and, in effect, reinscribe particular behaviors. Identities may be unstable, open for change, but behaviors – at least behaviors important for the persistence of the political economy – remain relatively controlled.

As we collectively investigate this transition – how to explain it and how to critique it – we cannot help but turn to Raymond Williams, not simply because his work on mass media was so influential, but also because it turns out to be so prescient. Toward the end of his Television: Technology and Cultural Form, Williams expresses his frustration with the ways in which television – which had progressive cultural potential – had been turned into a tool controlled by a few corporations. If potential was going to be reworked into the form – if any action was possible – Williams asserted, its conditions were to be “information, analysis, education, discussion … ” (1974, p. 152). Given the parallel rise in optimism over changes in media usage over the last several decades, and the accompanying ways in which much of the potential failed to manifest, we see this essay as an attempt to explain the ways changes in media – as material changes in the way people communicate – articulate to changes in culture as one move toward explanation and analysis, as one step toward refiguring the current assemblage, to borrow a Deleuzian term (Deleuze and Guattari, 2000, p. 504),¹ of publicized privacy.²

As we work toward an understanding of publicized privacy and its influence within a culture of control, we suggest that this condition – while of course overdetermined – results in large part from material changes in contemporary media/media usage, the ideology and romanticism of “freedom/limits” attached to media usage, and, finally, compulsory habits that encourage us to publicize ourselves while only being vaguely aware of the consequences. As we do with all such explanations in critical studies, we work through this explanation as a way to help us think about ways of refiguring the current cultural condition. This is a small step toward the information, analysis, education, and discussion called for by Raymond Williams.

From mobile privatization to publicized privacy

We turn, then, to Williams’ landmark treatise, Television: Technology and Cultural Form. Here, Williams set the early ground for cultural critics interested in the ways in which television as a form was altering the relationship between spaces – private and public, mobile, and stationary. Williams, referring to multiple “electric” technologies that arrived somewhat concurrently with television, saw the emergence of an at once mobile and home-centered way of living: “mobile privatization” (1974, p. 26). Broadcast technologies allowed the new mobile work force, “with better material conditions and private homes,” a way to have contact privately with the “out there,” to encounter the world on their own terms, bringing the outside in (ibid., p. 27). Although Williams was concerned with the way this “mobile privatization” ultimately worked hegemonically, remarking dominant ideology rather than encouraging the production of numerous local value streams, the concept of mobile privatization held firm regardless. Space had materially changed: in private, without physically moving, one was privately mobile, not interacting but living within a larger world while simultaneously sitting still.

Taking off from this model with the advent of smaller, more mobile, television sets, Lynn Spigel (2001) argued that these sets allowed for “privatized mobility,” a rather complicated alteration of space. Hence, with a television set which traveled (and certainly we have a more extreme version of this now), the family’s domestic situation could be literally mobile while maintaining its same relationship to the external world. Televised mobility allowed “family and domesticity together even while people were on the go” (ibid., p. 121). Spigel was careful to note, however, that she was not solely discussing the material affects of the “travelling television.” Unlike today, for example, when it is far easier to move through space with mobile media (DVD players in cars, smart phones, iPads, etc.), Spigel argued that even when people were not moving with their sets – as many were not – the existence of the sets and the discourse around them together created a sense of privatized mobility. We travel, alone or as a group, with the sense of our own access to mediation. As Baudrillard would have it, “to each his own bubble, that is the law today” (1988, p.39).

Following this line of thinking, we introduce “publicized privacy” to indicate one manifestation of control society and to place it firmly within the grasps of a media theory that understands the relationship between mediation and culture as one that is overdetermined with material, ideological, and psychical underpinnings. In terms of the material, along with a long line of theorists and critics who are concerned with the relationship between mediation and body (including supporters and detractors of McLuhan’s position), we argue that any use of media has a material alteration of the body, its movement, and our understanding of the body and the world. Hence, when we concern ourselves with technologies that “move” the body and/or become “part of” the body, the materiality itself must be one aspect of the change. As a result, mobile media and mobility alter the material abilities/senses of the body and, combined with other factors (the necessary clause to escape charges of determinism), encourage particular changes in identity and meaning.

Like “old” media, the mobile character of new technological interface makes the relationship between mobility theory and media studies all the more relevant. Although a medium like television brought the outside in, the grounded television set encouraged the body to be stationary while engaged with the medium; television may have worked to mobilize the outside, but the viewer was stationary while engaged with the medium. Mobility worked only in terms of moving a world to the viewer, not allowing the viewer to be mobilized and not allowing the viewer to mobilize a response. Smart phones, for example, not only encourage interactive communication of a variety of sorts, but also given their mobility and vast uses, become metaphorically a permanent prosthetic. In a recent essay on mobile technologies, Hashimoto and Campbell suggest that the gap between self and thing is reduced on both a material and cultural level to such a degree that “it can now be assumed that in certain situations, being toward others and things has become ontologically indistinguishable” (2008, p. 547).

Echoing claims made separately by Marshall McLuhan (1964) and John Peters (2001), among others, John Urry (2007) suggests that ultimately the biological sciences are based on the ideal of individual perfectibility, and hence logically encourage the development of enhancements that would ultimately conclude in a transcendence of the individual him/herself (ibid., p. 46). The cultural influence of this alteration is varied and multiple, but it bears impact on the phenomenon we are discussing here. When Urry argues that new media of this type create a “mobile citizenship” that undermines the nation-state to the degree that one’s sense of geographic spaces has been altered (ibid., p. 189) or when Hardt and Negri see a disintegration of the nation state’s hold on individual identities, each points toward, or assumes, the materiality of the changes wrought by new mobile technologies. Moreover, regardless of the cultural interface, it is not only the identity of the individual that changes (less tied to nationalism, less tied to rationality, less tied to delay, more tied to immediate interests, and emotionality) but also the ways this individual communicates. If we see, as many have, the high era of print culture as one of rationality, of distanced reason, the oncoming epistemology of mobile media portends a human subject unhinged from permanence, able to communicate when she/he wants, where one wants. As a result, as Jodi Dean (2009) observes, without the solid constraints found in modernity and with the material changes in media, the individual expresses what would have been private thoughts publicly, emotions immediately (ibid., pp. 66–67).

In addition to the ways that material alterations to the body have encouraged changes in epistemology, these alterations are taking place within a dominant discourse that is associated with, and articulated around, all types of mobility.³ From the discourses concerning the freedom of the open road and of all modes of physical transportation to discourses that have associated computer technologies (especially the Internet) with freedom (to get what one wants, to be who one wants, to have access to information one wants, and to see friends when one wants), the idea of movement as a form of freedom is closely articulated. Even the fears associated with such freedom (e.g., the dangerous hitchhiker, the online predator, and the consequences of sharing too much information) are all downsides that emphasize freedom; in this case, freedom gone too far.

In particular, this ideology of freedom has been associated with political freedom. As Jeremy Packer (2008) points out, this freedom is not solely for those in power but is also articulated around those on the margins, on the outsides of institutional power. For example, Lynn Spigel (2001) argues that mobile television sets were advertised early on as having a portability that could be associated with the women’s movement (pp. 126, 128). Tim Cresswell (2006, p. 199) and Virginia Scharff (1991) separately highlighted the ways the women’s suffrage movement utilized automobiles as a sign of political freedom for women, with, for example, Margaret Foley touring in a car to illustrate movement as a sign of her freedom.

More recently, Hashimoto and Campbell (2008) analyzed the ways mobile technologies have increased the ways individuals fantasize their connections to each other, to the social whole, and to other spaces/places. Hashimoto and Campbell stress the same material/ideological double impact we stress in this essay. While technologies enter a world in which ideology encourages subjects to envision the movement of the individual through ethereal spaces and changing subjectivities (and to see this as a right), they also (and consequently) work to encourage people to utilize prosthetics to make the world increasingly mobile. In the United States, at least, the ideology concerning mobile communication and social networking coincides with the ideology encouraged by these same technologies. Material and ideological “encouragement” work hand in hand.

Additionally, this ideology of freedom is articulated so strongly that, as Tim Cresswell illustrates in his readings of US law, the notion of mobility as a right, as “intertwined with the very notion of what it is to be a national citizen,” is not only assumed in public ideology but is also coded into law (2008, p. 151). Cresswell (2006) argues that mobility is so strongly and romantically tied to citizenship that there is a degree to which to be denied mobility is to be denied citizenship altogether (e.g., the ways in which immigrants and tramps are detained or informally cordoned off; pp. 151–167). After working through a series of legal statutes, Cresswell concludes that the ability to move at will is so assumed in US discourse that “this interconnection between the human body and the wider world signals the arrival of the prosthetic-subject-citizen. To be a subject is to be linked and to have an ideology of freedom in one’s movement” (2006, p. 217).

Ultimately, social networking has entered – or is a part of – an assemblage in which its use as a tool to enable the subject to extend in space and time is encouraged both by the technology itself and by the cultural ideology through which it is understood. When we combine the altered materiality of the body and the ideology of freedom with habitual compulsion, we have a calculus proper for the publication of privacy.

It would be difficult to argue that a public panic has not arisen over the mix of cell phone use and automobile driving; however, it would be equally difficult to find evidence that the panic is causing much of a difference, or at least a decline, in the number of people talking while driving or texting while driving. Although the warnings associated with the anti-text message while driving discourse certainly act as a critique or caution to the “mobility as freedom” nexus, there is something to be seen in the fact that, even with these warnings in hand, the narrative implies (and many of us can acknowledge) that there is a compulsion toward texting, toward the use of the cell phone, that goes beyond our desire for safety. Like many activities that bring us pleasure, there are constant warnings that the freedom of the activity is riddled with danger, an enjoyable danger that the compulsion takes us beyond.

The policing of texting while driving narratives is instructive to the degree that it helps us see better the ways that fantasies of freedom and the prosthetic character of media come together to tap into our tendencies to develop compulsory habits. Indeed, who among us does not understand the feeling of freedom and compulsion involved in digital interactivity? While reading and writing this chapter, both the authors and many readers will check their email multiple times; during conference panels, we have seen panelists update their Facebook status during other panelists’ presentations and during the Q/A session; many of us have either watched a conversational partner “mindlessly” check email and/or have checked our own during that same conversation. And while a larger percentage of us actively take these actions, there is a simultaneous cultural understanding that these activities are “a waste of time.” Fun or not, these actions are said to get in the way of more productive labor (or in place of “real” relationships), and yet we continue to partake precisely because the actions not only bring pleasure but also a sense of release; we feel a compulsion to move from a situation that brings either labor, pressure, or boredom to a situation of pleasure.

Because texting has become a dominant means of communication among youth, research has begun to explore – or construct – the notion of the addictive nature of text messaging and other forms of communicative mobility. Indeed, there has been a movement to include the category “Internet Addiction” in the forthcoming edition of the DSM-V, the dominant manual for psychological disorders (Block, 2008). Although there are multiple scientific explanations for compulsory communicative behaviors, most would suggest that an experience of pleasure does not on its own explain the habitual behavior, especially when the warnings of the downside are so fatal. Just as Freud once observed (1961) that there are aspects of ritualized behavior that go “beyond the pleasure principle,” Jodi Dean argues that such behaviors are attractive, in part, because they bring pleasure and invite punishment: “Contemporary subjects increasingly lack self-control, in part because they lack a strong sense of self that arises through discipline and … look outside themselves for some authority to impose control” (2009, p. 66). From a Lacanian perspective, Dean is pointing here to the demise of disciplinary society’s paternal figure (see Gunn and Frentz, 2010). While the subject needs, indeed desires, a sense of self, now each must seek it out rather than having a pre-established, teaching of self-discipline. Part of this sense of the subject’s self, we suggest, comes from those actions and controls which force an understanding of the limits of public and private, of privacy and publicity. Consequently, the compulsory habits that orbit social networking and the ideology accompanying it can be read as unconscious attempts to discern the limits of autonomy and the locus of the private self.

In summary, in addition to the material changes encouraged by technological prosthetics and the ways we think about social networking through the ideology of freedom, we are suggesting that our interactions with social networking play out in increasingly compulsory habits. Furthermore, as Hashimoto and Campbell observe, technologies such as cell phones create a sense of space that “is a product of fantasies of pure communication, and of the other being present now, without any of the distances and difficulties enhanced by discerning vision” (2008, p. 546). These fantasies, reinforced and remarked in our persistent performance and habitual routines, further contribute to an expectation of perpetual contact, albeit contact with those we have chosen. In other words, not only are we compulsively drawn toward continual communication and publicity by habit, but also by participating in a network, we demand the same of others, we anticipate the same by others. We seem to be unwittingly compelling each other into habits of miscalculated – if not disastrously distracted – intimacy.

Convenient publicity

Thus far we are suggesting that social networking has entered an imaginary space in which its use as a tool to enable the subject to be extended in space and time is encouraged, both materially and via the cultural ideology through which it is understood. When we combine the altered materiality of the body, the ideology of freedom, and compulsive usage, we have a calculus proper for the publication of the private.

Relying in large part on Jacques Rancière, in his recent book, The Political Life of Sensation, Davide Panagia argues that politics “is an activity of recognition of that which is given to the sensible” (2009, p. 6). In a series of what can best be described as genealogical case studies, Panagia probes the ways politics is a perceptual practice and, significantly, urges us to think through some of the ways that some “events” or images can disrupt the senses, upsetting politics of the norm. Reading Rancière (1998) through Attali (1985) on this one point, we might say that the interest for Panagia concerns those moments of hegemonic incoherence represented by “noise” within the parameters of music as Panagia observes, democracy in action is “first and foremost a politics of noise” (2009, p. 48).

Panagia’s case studies cover multiple moments in which the world assumed becomes the world rethought, moments when what we see, hear, smell, and feel outside the bounds of our perceptual expectations. Panagia refers to these as moments of “advenience,” (pp. 150–153). It is in such moments, he claims, that we have the greatest opportunity to disrupt assumed meanings, to fracture dominant understandings of the world.

Relevant to the argument of this chapter, the merging of new media prosthetics, the ideology of “freedom,” and compulsive usage creates a condition that favors the convenient (rather than advenient) expression of temporary emotions to a public, which reads them as permanent or as part of one’s identity. These moments of convenience encourage the expression of attitudes that provide the “speaker” with a sensation of “freedom” while simultaneously placing their comments in the realm of public discipline or, rather, control. What one experiences as a “pure” expression of private emotions in a kind of familiar or intimate domesticity nevertheless leaves one exposed to ideological and material confrontation (in a word, to “control”).

Again, any cursory review of contemporary scholarship concerning digital mobilities would find a repetition of a claim that contemporary culture has moved from a Foucault-described society of “self-discipline” to one of a more Deleuzian culture of “intelligent control.” In the final chapter of Mobility without Mayhem, Jeremy Packer (2008) argues that we see this shift in emphasis in the ideological “dreams” of error-free automobiles, automobiles which are controlled digitally, driver free, and to remain at a safe distance from each other. Rather than a society in which individuals must train themselves to be more careful drivers, Packer sees a transition to a system in which the individual citizen/subject has less need for self-monitoring, self-control in one sense and therefore more time and energy on production, especially as more and more spaces are reterritorialized as work spaces (ibid., pp. 270, 282).

On this point, Urry (2007) agrees, suggesting that from the increasing use of novel systems of monitoring, surveillance, and regulation of bodies in airports to the surveillance allowed by mobile media, there is now less of a need for a society of discipline as we transition to a society of control.⁴ Urry succinctly puts it this way: “not only are people, machines and places on the move … but so too are the means of tracking, ordering and governing that are increasingly detached from specific locations and which may well engender a dark future” (ibid., p. 270). These arguments, and those of Dean cited above, certainly work hand in hand with our argument that not only do we see a move to a culture of control, but also this move – and the seemingly individual desire or compulsion toward publicized privacy – is overdetermined.

Part of what we hope to draw attention to is the ways this shift to a culture of control – at least in terms of publicized privacy – is particularly menacing, especially in terms of the relations between the “individual” and his/her sense of culture as a whole. We have argued that the contemporary logics of social networking advance a kind of phantom domesticity – a feeling of the safety and freedom of privacy. In the move toward a society of control, then, we are encouraged to forget the various ways in which norms of decorum and propriety are enforced until, of course, the moment of discipline. We have also suggested that the material changes that accompany “new” media prosthetics, the sensation of freedom attached to mobility and articulated to an ideology of omnipotence, and the habits of genre, collectively, overdetermine a form of disciplinary amnesia through the misdirection of a publicized privacy.

This cultural shift toward publicized privacy, at least implicitly, invites each of us to behave as if our tactics of everyday life go unseen (indeed, as if we are walking around the house in our underwear). In this sense, Rancière’s (1998) concern with the social motto of power, “there is nothing to be seen here,” works hand in hand with an ideology that tells the citizen that, “there is no way to be seen here” while keeping him or her under control; not self-discipline but cultural control of actively undisciplined behavior. It may feel at times as if we are in the living room or pub, but in today’s economic environment, we are instead always at work – and yet we forget.

Conclusion: toward analysis, information, education, and discussion

In a general sense, we find ourselves in a familiar situation as we move toward a conclusion. We assume, and we realize there is little controversial or novel in this assumption, that subjectivity and agency are overdetermined, never complete, and always in a state of being remarked publicly, by others, and by ourselves. Moreover, when we examine the performance of self in the public sphere of online social networks, we see that subjects are encouraged to express immediate thoughts or emotions through a combination of material, ideological, and psychological factors. Further, we have expressed our worry that the sensational pleasures associated with such communication, the immediate ecstasy of expression that comes from the breaking of “rules and rule making” (Panagia, 2009, pp. 29–31), ultimately offers little for the individual other than to place themselves open for a moment of control.

Whether self-discipline or cultural control, the task for theorists and critics perhaps remains the same. Outside of offering an admittedly limited and incomplete “explanation,” where do we take such an inquiry? Returning to the conclusion of Raymond Williams’s Television: Technology and Cultural Form: when action is necessary, its conditions are analysis, information, education, and discussion. A discussion of the limits of “privatized publicity” brings noise to the ways in which we talk and approach our social networking, cautions about the metaphors we deploy that encourage us to see a public forum as a private space of communication.

Williams, we recall, observed that television, and televisual devices, act as the “contemporary tools of the long revolution toward an educated and participatory democracy, and of the recovery of effective communication in complex and urban and industrial societies” (1974, p. 151). Nonetheless, he warned these could also act as the tools of a “counter-revolution” in which, under the cover to talk about choice

Of course, the conditions today differ, and while we do not wish to point to corporations as agents, we do want to suggest that while interactive sites and social networking in general could indeed operate as places from which the “multitude” emerges (Hardt and Negri, 2005), they could just as easily become – under the cover of a discourse of freedom and expression – the locale by which meanings, behaviors, and actions are “held in place,” as publicized privacy marks one as open and ready for discipline.

While Panagia may well be correct in asserting that democratic politics is “first and foremost a politics of noise” (ibid., p. 42), he sidesteps one productive site of emergence for such noise. Productive noise should not be expected in moments of immediacy, of aesthetic sensation or pleasure, that leads to a disruption of rules and rule following. Instead, it is in the moments afterward, those moments where rules have been broken and discipline has followed, with “proper ideology” reinscribed, that we critics must place our focus, must highlight the ways in which the offer of “freedom,” of free expression, is always already illusory. While we have little influence to alter the material changes reviewed here, we can be a part of the process of questioning the ideological. These are the locations where we must make noise that opens ears and eyes to other possibilities.

Notes

References

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