The politics of personal information privacy for the Facebook Age - towards an articulation and assemblage theory of PIP

Abstract

Located at the intersection of privacy studies, media studies, and cultural studies, this dissertation challenges the notion of post-privacy and radical transparency. It argues for the reinvigoration of the political dimension of personal information privacy and challenges readers to scrutinize the ways in which journalists, politicians, Facebook officials, and scholars alike make it more difficult for ordinary people to define and negotiate for themselves the meaning and relevance of their personal information privacy. The first chapter looks at seven years of journalistic reporting, Facebook's data use policy as well as The White House Guidelines for Consumer Privacy. I argue that journalists, Facebook officials, and politicians alike overemphasize individual user control and technical options as solution to the complicated relationship between PIP and Facebook. I criticize that journalists make no or only superficial attempts to connect Facebook's privacy policy to larger contextual factors - either political, cultural, or economical. The second chapter investigates the economic dimension of the PIP discourse and examines more closely Facebook's SEC statements, Facebook's quarterly business reports as well as other internal documents, and newspaper articles from the The Wall Street Journal and Fortune Magazine. I argue that journalists provide a one-dimensional and trivializing account of the economy. The chapter demonstrates how journalists and prominent scholars help to perpetuate the myth of the technological sublime and, in so doing, render themselves involuntary allies to Facebook's misleading rhetoric of individual user empowerment.The third chapter attempts to correct the mistakes above and suggests first steps towards an articulation and assemblage theory of PIP. The chapter outlines how such a theory relies on the ordinary and pragmatic tradition of cultural studies while simultaneously introducing the notion of accountability for information. The final chapter applies the articulation and assemblage theory of PIP to the college class room. It discusses the foundations of a new PIP pedagogy, introduces a number of guidelines and exercises for the classroom, and discusses a variety of readings that address the issue of PIP in a network culture. The chapter culminates in a syllabus that is designed with a college class room in mind.