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JonPenneyFirstPaper 6 - 11 Mar 2009 - Main.JonPenney
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The Tragedy of the Communicative Commons: Privacy, Consumerism, and Metaphor Inc. | | | Privacy is not doing so well these days. Today, the greatest threats do not concern places like the home— the spheres of privacy and intimacy the Founders care so much about — but consumer information compiled about and from citizens by private commercial entities and stored in databases easily accessible to the state or corporate interests by contract or subpoena. Acknowledging that the Constitution’s privacy protections are outmoded is just one step. Central to the problem is citizens’ indifference to their own privacy trade-offs in our culture of consumerism and convenience. Polls show people do care about privacy loss, they just happen to do very little about it, or, at least, do not understand how trading away informational privacy to save a few measly bucks might be a bad idea.
Privacy Law's Metaphors | |
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< | How, then, to connect citizen concern about privacy to action? Here, privacy theorists have overwhelmingly turned to metaphor. In fact, privacy— both as a concept and goal in law and policy— and threats to it, have been explained and disseminated to the general public predominantly by way of metaphors. Who can forget Warren and Brandeis invoking the common law metaphor of a “castle” in their work Right to Privacy, to explain the importance of “a man’s house” as an “impregnable” bastion of privacy? Or the famous Big Brother metaphor, invoking an all knowing and all seeing state entity Orwell warned of? Indeed, legal scholars love privacy metaphors. As soon as one has aged beyond its “best before” date, their endless search for a new one continues unabated. | >
> | How, then, to connect citizen concern about privacy to action? Here, privacy theorists have overwhelmingly turned to metaphor. In fact, privacy— both as a concept and goal in law and policy— and threats to it, have been explained and disseminated to the general public predominantly by way of metaphors. Who can forget Warren and Brandeis invoking the common law metaphor of a “castle” in their work Right to Privacy, to explain the importance of “a man’s house” as an “impregnable” bastion of privacy? Or the famous Big Brother metaphor, invoking an all knowing and all seeing state entity Orwell warned of? Indeed, legal scholars love privacy metaphors. As soon as one has aged beyond its “best before” date, their endless search for a new one continues unabated. | | | The Tragedy of the Communicative Commons
A powerful metaphor is useful. Metaphors provide a unifying concept for new and disparate problems. They also provide common language to link new challenges – like emerging privacy threats – to familiar ways of thinking and doing. This is essential to citizen interest and action. But privacy advocates have recruited metaphor to their cause since at least the 19th Century and what have they to show for it? Not much. Apathy remains the order of the day, with privacy interests often subsumed by the domain of consumerism. There are many reasons for this, but a key one, I would argue, is that advocates have failed to recognize that reliance on metaphors may do more harm than good in the informational privacy wars. | | | WORDCOUNT: 999
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