DIMINISHED THOUGHT

Check out Motorolas new motophone designed for individuals in developing nations.

Labels: cellphone, digital divide

Let'ts talk about sex and blogging....last Christmas when I returned home to Little Rock to celebrate the holidays I had the opportunity to meet with Robert Steinbuch, a central figure in a minor Washington sex scandal that may have far reaching implications for how individuals can conduct themselves online. While working in a senate office Steinbuch had the misfortune of dallying with one Jessica Cutler who chronicled her simultaneous relationships with six men on her blog the Washingtonienne. He’s since filed suit in United States District Court.

This scenario is a perfect example of how artificial the line is drawn between online interaction and the “real” world. The conflict between her and Steinbuch stems from how private information within their relationships should be managed. Relationships are multi-modal and although Jessica Cutler claims that she was writing only for a group of close friends, she failed to consider that her statements made in an online medium might have consequences for those involved.

Communication Privacy Management (CPM) holds that privacy is best conceived of as dialectical tension between the need to keep information private and need to self-disclose (Petronio & Caughlin, 2006). It is often used to describe privacy within families but it can reasonably be extended to encompass other groups. It employs a boundary metaphor to denote information that belongs to an individual or set of individuals with the boundaries varying in permeability based upon the nature of the information (Petronio, Jones, & Morr, 2003). Information is often held collectively by groups of people creating external boundaries or by subsets of members within a larger group creating internal privacy cells. CPM posits that individuals feel that they have ownership of information salient to their own identities which they regulate in conjunction with other privy individuals via a rule management system which is taught within the family. Boundary turbulence occurs “when people are unable to collectively develop, execute, or enact rules guiding permeability, ownership, and linkages” which in turn leads to conflict (Petronio, 2002). One case in which boundary turbulence can erupt is when privacy is invaded because it infringes upon the control and ownership of information (Petronio, 2000).

The import of this case will be in determining the extent that bloggers are responsible for preserving the privacy of those with which they interact. If Steinbuch succeeds it could set a precedent severely limiting what you can say about someone online. However, I’m not so sure Steinbuch is wrong. Invasion of privacy is defined by Black’s Law Dictionary as the “unwarranted appropriation or exploitation of one’s personality, publicizing one’s private affairs with which the public has no legitimate concern, or wrongful intrusion into one’s private activities, in such a manner as to cause mental suffering, shame or humiliation to person of ordinary sensibilities.”This conflict stems from Cutler unilaterally choosing to violate tacit privacy boundaries found in most romantic relationships by sharing information regarding their sexual encounters in her and Steinbuch’s fledgling relationship. Steinbuch never had an opportunity to negotiate appropriate boundaries of privacy. It seems likely that a more mature relationship would have provided the opportunity to establish. Given Cutlers relationships with six other men it may seem doubtful that she’d care, but the most important factor is that Steinbuch never had an opportunity to negotiate appropriate boundaries of privacy.

The internet as a medium may encourage boundary violations of this sort because individuals have an illusion of anonymity when sharing the private moments of their lives. Furthermore, the individuals with which people interact may be geographically distant and not move within the same social network reducing the potential for privacy violations to be discovered. However, there can be very real consequences when these admissions are detected by individuals known to the parties involved. A potential line of research may be to examine online self-disclosures in blogs and virtual communities and to test whether self-disclosures made in these environments would have been considered privacy violations within a geographically bound community or social network. Additionally, it would be useful to gauge how likely posters felt that these disclosures may become known to individuals within their local communities and social networks

Black, H.C. (Ed.). (1979). Invasion of privacy. In H.C. Black (Ed.) Black’s Law Dictionary (5th ed.), St.Paul: West Publishing Co

Petronio, S. (2000). The boundaries of privacy: Praxis of everyday life. In S. Petronio (Ed.) Balancing the secrets of private disclosures. Mahwah, NJ: LEA.

Petronio, S., & Caughlin, J.P. (2006). Communication privacy management theory: Understanding families. In D.O. Braithwaite & L.A. Baxter (Eds.), Engaging theories of family communication. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Petronio, S., Jones, S.S., & Morr, M. (2003). Family privacy dilemmas: A communication privacy management perspective. In L. Frey (Ed.), Group communication in contexts: Studies in bona fide groups. Mahwah, NJ: LEA.

Labels: privacy blog politics

The BBC may be smarter than most. Perhaps following the lead of American broadcasters they've chosen to make their content available online. Recently they've recently announced that they will be partnering with Azureus, a bittorrent client developer, to make HD quality shows available online through their Zudeo software. Zudeo can best be described as an HD version of youtube. This is a huge improvement over video files found on itunes which are marred by low resolution making them unsuitable to watch on any screen much larger than a computer monitor. Furthermore, not only will new content be released, but catalogues of older shows will also be available.

I recently tried out the service by downloading free content. A 69 mb HD Harry Potter trailer downloaded in about a minute and a half with download speeds topping out at just over 600 kb/s. While they haven't released pricing information, one can hope that it will be reasonable.

UPDATE: Check out the discussion taking place on slashdot about this now.

Labels: bittorent, p2p

I've been transcribing interviews from Beijing for my masters thesis dealing with cell phone usage among young, urban Chinese. One interview I just finished has a girl telling me about how important it is for university students to own a mobile phone in order to participate in university social life. She told me that parent's often purchased mobile phones for their children when they were accepted to university as a reward, even if it was difficult for the parents to afford it. She related it to the one child policy in China, implying that parent's restricted to one child would go the extra mile to make them happy.

Anyway I'll have to see if that finding is replicated in some of the other interviews but I thought it was very interesting.

Labels: cellphone, China, Purdue

Done with the semester. Check out our proposal for an online learning community that serves Purdue University. Hopefully this is something that will be followed next semester. In my opinion, the most innovative feature, the online citation database/generator (for lack of a better term), hasn't been described in adequate detail. Check out the section on article citations in this previous post for more information.

Labels: Community, learning, projects, Purdue

How can the Third World receive internet access? The answer might lie in a cool project from First Mile Solutions which I was turned onto a few months ago by a friend who specializes in extending internet access to individuals in Third world countries. Essentially they provide asynchronous, internet based communication media such as email and video messaging (which may be especially important for non-literate populations) to rural villages to which it would be impractical or unprofitable to extend the communication infrastructure. They do this by using wifi technology mounted in vehicles that drive past kiosks in remote areas which then transfer their stored messages to the vehicle’s storage device. Later when the vehicle comes within range of an internet connected hub it transfers the data from the vehicle and picks up any incoming messages. In short, they’ve created a digital postman. For a demonstration see the video here.

While one of the capabilities that this technology is the ability to view cached webpages, a majority of their promotional material focuses on interpersonal, dyadic exchanges. However, a question that needs to be asked is whether it is possible to create a web based “networked” community that can perhaps help villagers exchange information more efficiently? Technologically the capabilities are there for a bulletin board system but how effective would this be among a non-literate population?

Labels: digital divide, india, wireless