Literature Review
Public and Private Internet Spheres
Molly Rooney
ABSTRACT
This Literature Review examines how privatized Social Networking Sites,
like Facebook have become publicized through new privacy policies and
increase monitoring throughout our society. This paper discovers how the
public sphere has now entered our private sphere, diminishing our
freedom.
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Over the past couple decades; the Internet has become an essential part
of our society’s everyday routines. The Internet has completely transformed how
we interact in our professional and private lives. We are able to communicate
with people all over the globe faster and cheaper than ever before. The Internet
has also allowed everyday people to become producers of media content via
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Blogger, and many more sites. Some of these
producers are striving to get their media content noticed by the rest of the world,
but most are just taking part in today’s most recent technologies. The majority of
web users are unaware of where and whom their personal information posted on
the Internet is going. This unknown is where the problem arises; one’s private
information should be kept private. However, posting your private information on
the Internet suddenly makes that information public,
Private Social Network Sites
Social Networking Sites (SNS’s) have become a phenomenon in the past
few years. Kids, parents, and even dogs partake in creating a personal profile on
popular Social Networking Sites, such as Facebook. Facebook “beginning in
2004 as a social network site only for Harvard students, quickly encompassed
users at over 2,000 other university and college campuses in the United States”
(Zywica 2). This exclusive targeted audience allowed a place for college
students to privately interact with one another.
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What attracted so many college students to Facebook was “mainly to keep
in touch with friends and acquaintances they have met previously” (Vorvoreanu
73), and another “important part of online social networking is the creation of a
personal profile, an online representation of one’s self” (Vorvoreanu 74).
According to the data collected from 35 college students at a southeastern
university by Dr. Mihaela Vorvoreanu, a majority of the students believed “that all
interaction on Facebook is, and should be personal” (Vorvoreanu 74). Due to
this popular personal and private mindset, many Facebook users are not afraid to
express themselves on their personal profiles. Originally, only college students
had access to these personal profiles, but they soon expanded the network and
the college students had “negative feelings toward Facebook being open to highschool students and then to everyone with an email address” (Vorvoreanu 73).
Now, self-presentation via Social Networking Sites is open to everyone and
starting at a young age.
In a study done by Thomas King, most children about to enter middle
school are still naïve about Social Networking Sites, “by the end of sixth grade
however, 70 percent had opened accounts” (King 38). Kids in middle school are
still developing and thrive off of “’being cool’… as part of this, they often
experiment with their own self-image, manipulating their online personality to fit a
wide variety of stereotypes” (King 38). As years pass, “youth shift from MySpace
to Facebook as they enter high school” (King 40), and “students begin to present
themselves more honestly on their profile pages” (King 40). It is argued
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however, that many Facebook users are still not completely honest on their
personal profiles.
Social Networking Sites allow users to engage in self-presentation, which
“is a theoretical construct that refers to the processes individuals use in
attempting to control how others perceive them,” (Smock 7). Many people aim to
enhance themselves through their personal profile and use “ingratiation, which
manipulates appearance, personality, or behaviors to project greater
attractiveness” (Zywica 6). Social Networking Sites make it very easy for one to
manipulate their image because they are “able to post only that information which
presents a desired image” (Mendelson 3). The desired Facebook image seems
very relevant to a lifestyle one would desire in the offline world.
Jolene Zywica suggests that the desired Facebook image would include
the “number of friends and photos that are interpreted for attractiveness, dress,
dating, and other behaviors. Achievement could be judged from work experience,
courses taken, honors, extracurricular accomplishments and awards” (Zywica 4).
In addition to these desired characteristics, users can also post “interests,
contact information, and unique information” (Zywica 9). Users of Social
Networking Sites post pictures, self-interests, and information about themselves
on their personal profiles because they believe that they are actually “personal.”
When Facebook first originated, there was actually some privacy to the
users personal profiles. However, over the past few years Facebook has made
many changes, “with numerous modifications and additions to its privacy policy”
(Butler 41). Facebook came out with new privacy rules, which the
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“’recommended’ settings allow statuses, photos, and wall posts created by the
user to be viewed by ‘everyone’—the entire Facebook community” (Butler 41).
Many people do not take the time to read the privacy changes in fine print at the
top of their page, making their information “accessible by larger audiences than
most people intended” (Butler 41).
The changes in privacy settings have caused a great amount of
controversy; especially since the entire Facebook community is not just college
students anymore. Today, many big time corporations and businesses have
Facebook pages. This is problematic because “students perceive Facebook as
their personal fun space and wish to keep it separate from the professional,
business, and other aspects of their lives” (Vorvoreanu 74). One student that was
interviewed for “Perceptions of Corporations on Facebook: An Analysis of
Facebook Social Norms,” believes that
It’s almost an invasion of privacy type thing. Like, I have a private
Facebook account solely for the purpose that I don’t want people I don’t
know looking at my information or looking at my pictures, especially when
it comes to corporations. My personal life is different from my professional
life. (Vorvoreanu 75)
Many people believe that personal profiles on Social Networking Sites should be
able to be kept private. However, the issue is that this information is on the
Internet – The World Wide Web. Anything posted on the Internet can be
monitored in one way or another.
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Public Monitoring
The book iSpy by Mark Andrejevic, goes into even further detail about our
privacy on the Internet and states that, “the Internet ‘allows everyone to become
a producers of media content,’ we find ourselves generating information about
ourselves that is increasingly available to our friends, acquaintances, and
omnivorously curious web surfers” (Andrejevic 35). Every piece of information we
put on the Internet, whether it is on Facebook, Twitter, Online Dating sites, or
even consumer shopping pages – everything is being monitored. Nothing on the
Internet is private anymore,
It’s true that citizens and consumers are losing control over information
about themselves, that increasingly their movements and purchases, the
details of their daily lives are being recorded, gathered and sorted. In this
respect, it’s also true that the public can no longer nurture one of the
characteristic expectations of mass society: that of being able to pass
relatively unnoticed in a crowd, of being able, for the most part, to fly
below the radar of surveillance, whether in the form of state surveillance,
commercial monitoring, or even neighborhood gossip. (Andrejevic 6)
Most people are aware that posting information on the Internet cannot be
completely private, even with the certain privacy options available, but most do
not understand how many people could actually be seeing their posted
information. As Andrejevic points out, “we know in general terms that we are
being monitored, but we are far from having a sense of how extensive, detailed,
and sophisticated the monitoring system has become” (Andrejevic 7). Not only
are individuals being monitored by the government and state, but also
individuals;
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wearable computing guru Steve Mann uses the term ‘co-veillance’ – as
opposed to surveillance – to refer to what I describe as lateral of peer
monitoring: not the state watching individuals or vice versa, but individuals
monitoring one another. Such monitoring has always been a part of social
interaction, but interactive technologies create shifting strategies for selfrepresentation, simulation, and anonymity. (Andrejevic 214)
There are differentiating opinions on monitoring, but many people agree that our
society is being corrupted by the inexistence of privacy today.
When Public Meets Private
Some argue that this new era of monitoring is a positive because this
technology “can help you screen potential employees, lovers, nannies,
colleagues” (Andrejevic 38), like
for example, the deployment of keystroke monitoring software (developed
for businesses to keep track of what employees are doing on their
computers) by parents to find out what their children are doing online, or
by husbands and wives to discover how their significant others are whiling
away their time in chat rooms: are they engaging in innocent discussions
of shared interest, flirting online – or something more?” (Andrejevic 36)
It is unfortunate that our society has come to the point where “activities that once
would have bordered on stalking have become routine” (Andrejevic 35). It has
become completely acceptable for people to watch over one another’s every
move. It is almost impossible to keep anything private anymore and it is
becoming a huge issue.
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Social Network users used to feel comfortable sharing photos, wall posts,
and statuses on their personal profiles because they were only intended to be
seen by friends. However, now “it seems every week, there is another story of
an employee losing their job over a Facebook status, a marriage breaking up due
to tgged photos of a cheating spouse, or a child being cyber-bullied on a network
that was once though to be secure” (Butler 41). In Status Control: An Admonition
Concerning the Publicized Privacy of Social Networking,” John M. Sloop and
Joshua Gunn, display many more examples:
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An intern working for a group producsing a new social networking
site, was fired this year for posting on rival site Facebook that he
was getting pade to ‘screw around on IM and that he was ‘talking
to [his] friends and getting paid for it” (CollegeRecruiter.com,
2006).
Stadium operations worker Dan Leone was fired by the
Philadelphia Eagles organization when Leone changed his
Facebook profile status to read that he was ‘devastated about
[Brian] Dawkins signing with Denver… Damn Eagles R
Reetarded!!!’ (ESPN.com New Services, 2009).
In Switzerland, a woman was fired by her employer, National
Suisse, when she updated her Facebook status on a day when
she claimed to have a migraine and couldn’t work. She was
turned in, the fired worker claims by a faux Facebook friends, who
she guessed was actually National Suisse management (BBC
News, 2009).
These examples are just a few of thousands of incidents that get reported for
their personal online profiles.
People should be allowed to say what they please in their personal,
private life… freedom of speech is an amendment after all. A sense of reality is
going to be lost in this country if people continue to be monitored on every word
they say and every move they make. Everyone will soon be under the control of
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the government and state at this rate. Public and private lives need to stay
separate in order to instill the democracy and freedom that this country was built
on.
“On my honor I have not given, nor received, nor witnessed any unauthorized
assistance on this work.”
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Work Cited
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