Courses / Module

Alongside the multiplication of publics and the tacit equation of (economic, moral) value with publicness (even, ‘publicity’), there have arrived new types of nonpublic, perhaps anti-public, social formation, but also the contrapuntal feeling that the domain of ‘the public good’ has been diminished by the intrusions of ‘private interest.’ Appearing in public, as (a) public, may exhibit our commitment to the constitutive role communicative reason plays in politics, but at the same time it may expose us to surveillance, by either state or corporate actors. Even as context collapse and the selfie seem to have made private life a relentless source of ‘social’ content, and therefore a rich vein of monetizable value, the digital citizen today frequently also conflates the right to privacy with the ever expanding expectation thereof. A quizzical mood of increasing distrust, even paranoia, accompanies higher incidence of that obsessional disorder we’ve all grown familiar with: ‘posting.’ Thus, we observe evolving tactics of disguise, camouflage, hiding, discretion, anonymity, and invisibility in a social ecology that seems to turn every device into an agent of the grid. That distrust indexes a constitutive irony to the apparently liberating, novel, and unique forms of subjectivity and sociality that (counter)publics create. If display/watching defines both the communicative context of politics and the transactional context of the market, in fact state and corporate power (or instead the neoliberal obviation of that distinction) pervade, or try to pervade, every public. Unwanted attention is a primary ‘digital risk,’ and privacy is thought to afford a source of protection. Paradoxically, insufficient attention is also a risk: what gets seen is controlled by forces not always visible. Thus, when reduced to ‘content,’ cultural discourse — indeed social life itself — is structured by the (proprietary) algorithms that determine what surfaces in our timelines and search results. And if algorithms are computer codes invisibly influencing what becomes public online, online circulation further presupposes vast unseen infrastructures linking the concrete and the esoteric: content is created and broadcast through enormously complex sociotechnical systems of information and circulation, state surveillance and citizen sousveillance, product design and prosumer impulse purchase, programmer skill and machine code. All of which makes it necessary to ask: what is happening in private? What even is 'the private’ or ‘privacy’ today? Might we see the private as something other than what is left in the shadows of our incessantly flashing ringlights?