Between Ted and Justin’s comments, I think we’re experiencing a confusion of terminology. There is a difference between “privacy” and “anonymity.” Just because they can, and often do, overlap, does not make them coterminus with one another. I think that the city/country dichotomy presents this paradox: When I am in New York, everything I do is anonymous, but nothing is private. In Wyoming (or the perhaps idealized Wyoming that I present in the paper), nothing is anonymous (everyone knows your name), but more things are private. This dichotomy, I think, perhaps partly explains the difference between our theoretical city and country dwellers. Ted, you noted that anonymity is part of the bargain we make with the city, but I think this is less a bargain and more a bait and switch. This goes to Justin’s point—because we are anonymous in the city, we don’t realize how much privacy we have “ceded to the multitudes.” That is to say, we don’t recognize how much the aggregation of data (Justin’s point) and the internet (Ted’s point) has made even our theoretically anonymous conduct non-private and, of course, commercially valuable. By contrast, spaces which disallow anonymity force us to be more thoughtful at least, if not more militant, about policing our privacy, because we cannot escape the fact that our conduct comes back to us and our identities in a fundamental way.

You both pointed out how our expectations of others “not caring” may have also reshaped our expectations, and I don’t disagree. But again, I think this may go back to the difference between what is anonymous and what is private. I still maintain that we have ceded privacy to the multitudes as an inevitable effect of urbanization, but I will concede that our ideas about anonymity have perhaps blinded us to some extent to that loss. Part of my point in this essay was that certain spaces force you to feel very acutely what constitutes your identity (killing the deer verses buying soup cans at the mega mart) and therefore alters your conception of what it means to protect that identity. Anonymity, the kind a city provides, cuts you off from that link--- you don’t feel your actions are you and so the fact that they aren’t private means much less than if your space forced you to constantly recognize what ultimately constitutes your identity.

-- DanaDelger - 17 Feb 2009