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Privacy: did you know that...?

Good afternoon everybody! In this post I decided to discuss a topic that I guess normally concerns everybody’s life: privacy. This is such an old concept. Suffice it to say that philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato deeply discussed privacy back in their time!

Andrew McStay’s book called Privacy and The Media gives us a broad possibility to see and understand privacy from various points of view. The one that I liked the most was written by Alan Westin, who defines privacy as ‘the ability to control how much about ourselves we reveal to others’ (McStay, 2017). Considering the fact that we live in the internet age, I find this definition pretty accurate, especially if seen through the lens of social media. Thanks to the advent of Facebook (which is one amongst the most used social platforms in the last decade), for instance, most users unconsciously revised their concept of “private”. Even the co-founder Mark Zuckerberg claimed that ‘the rise of social networking online means that people no longer have an expectation of privacy’ (Johnson, 2010). Before attending the Media Culture module, I naively thought that my privacy settings on my Facebook account would be safe enough to keep my “business” private. I must admit that ever since I discovered that we could be potentially and constantly spied by the system, I removed pretty much all of my personal information from my account.

Nowadays, hacking is an actual job. I cannot even recall how many times I have found out that somebody stole my Instagram or Facebook passwords. It is so easy to sneak into someone else’s business through the internet, and in the last decades, we have heard of various scandals of this kind. To give an example, we could refer to the famous Edward Snowden case. As McStay suggests, in June 2013, the whistle-blower (who is a former CIA employee):

‘revealed that intelligence agencies in so-called ‘Five Eyes’ nations (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom and the United States) are engaging in secret global surveillance. [...] What Snowden revealed is of profound historical importance. [...] For those of us living in [those countries], all forms of our networked communication are potentially being watched by our governments. This changes how we think about media and communication, and what we consider as private and public (McStay, 2017).

Snowden’s aim, he claimed, was to offer citizens the opportunity of understanding how they are governed. This case, alongside the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2016 (which it is said to have helped Trump to win the elections by illegally sharing up to 87 million Facebook users’ data) gives us an idea of how privacy invasion can be an easy task in the present day.

However, it is essential to mention that every country possesses laws that regard privacy as a human right (see article 8 of the Human Rights Act). One amongst them is, for instance, the Data Protection Act (1998), which is a UK act of Parliament that aims to the protection of citizens’ sensitive personal data (you can find more details here). Unfortunately, many public organizations often do not entirely respect this act, but there must always be a downside, even in the good things!

I am glad, though, to live in a continent where privacy is still considered as a priority, and where the law, despite the endless issues (in this case generated after the advent of the internet), still preserves our rights of having a private life.

Had you ever thought into details about this topic and its various features before? I hope you found this post useful. Thank you, as always, for reading it until the end. 😊

 Paola.

References

Johnson, B. (2010) ‘Privacy no longer a social norm, says Facebook founder’. Available from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jan/11/facebook-privacy [Accessed 20 Apr 2018]

McStay, A. (2017) Privacy and the Media. London: SAGE Publications Ltd.

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How many kinds of audiences do we really know?

Gillespie, M. (2005) Media Audiences. Milton Keynes: Open University Press/ McStay, A. (2010) Digital Advertising. London: Palgrave McMillan. Dear readers, today I am happy to discuss one of the topics that I found amongst the most interesting within our Media Culture module.

In his every-day life, each human being possesses an endless number of roles (most of the times without even realising it!). To give an example, every day of my life I simultaneously am somebody’s: sister, daughter, friend, student, housemate, and many others. One thing that not everyone usually realises is that in everything we do, a huge percentage of the time we are an audience. But what does the word ‘audience’ mean, exactly? Marie Gillespie suggested that:

The term “audience” refers to an assembly of listeners or viewers who come together, if only virtually, through shared consumption of film, television, radio, the internet, music or advertising. The term is also […] extended to include readerships of newspapers and magazines. Audiences may appear to be self-selecting, naturally occurring formations but they are […] targeted and produced by media institutions (Gillespie, 2005).

This means that media constantly manipulate us (even if we do not know it!). We can categorise audiences into various typologies. The first division is the one between mass audiences (large groups of people who share common interests) and niche audiences (small groups of people who share specific interests). In the 40s the Hypodermic Needle Theory was founded. It was the first theory based on the effects that the persuasive power of media has on mass audiences. Sociologists asserted that media powerfully (and negatively) affect the behavioral changes of their target audiences. This effect can be metaphorically described as that of a hypodermic injection. The HNT theory was clearly influenced by the historical reality of that time and nowadays it seems to be quite behind the times. Despite that, it highlights an undeniable reality: we are constantly, unconsciously influenced by the media.

Another distinction that must be drawn is the one among passive, active and interactive ones. An audience can be seen as passive when the media has a strong effect on it (basically what the HNT is based on). Unlike the first one, active audiences, instead, interact (often unconsciously) with the media by decoding messages and making sense of them according to social contexts of the audiences. Then, what is the difference between active and interactive audience? According to Andrew McStay, despite the similarities between the two, ‘interactive models [...] are also capable of media production (or at least influencing the media) as well as meaning production’ (McStay, 2010). Interactive models are thus strictly connected to the internet era, where users are allowed not only to interact within the media but also to actively  produce within them.

Considering the fact that the nature of audiences is continuously evolving, anthropologists nowadays are particularly interested in studying them into detail. To mention one of them, Gillespie found that:

‘Ross and Nightingale (2003) propose that there are at least five dimensions to all research about audiences. They include: the people involved; their activities; the media materials with which they engage; the media time/ space in which the engagement occurs; and the media power structure that delimits the control that each stakeholder in a media event can wield’ (Gillespie, 2005).

The evolution of media audiences is (obviously) connected to ethnographic data, which lie at the root of the phenomenon. Therefore, ethnography is one of the main branches of science that are necessary for a proper analysis of this phenomenon.

I learned a lot from this research and I find so interesting the fact that the way we react to media teaches us a lot about ourselves. The most curious fact about this post, for me, was discovering that I correspond to all the kinds of audiences that I previously described, according to the reality that I deal with.

Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed reading about this topic! I’ll be back soon with a new post :)

Paola

References

Gillespie, M. (2005) Media Audiences. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

McStay, A. (2010) Digital Advertising. London: Palgrave McMillan.

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Nationalism: let’s clarify! :)

Prynhawn Da! Good afternoon! Here I am with my second blog post.

As a foreign student, I often find myself particularly excited whenever somebody mentions my homeland. I come from Sicily, the island right at the bottom of that boot-shaped peninsula that is the rest of Italy. The day we discussed nationalism in one of our Media Culture seminars, I was the only foreign student in the class. Our lecturer made me reflect on the fact that, as the only foreigner, my sense of pride towards my origins was kind of amplified within that context. My feeling has to do with my national identity, which I later discovered not being a “modern” concept at all. Suffice it to say that Rousseau widely discussed national identity in his in his Social Contract (1762). In Erica Benner’s words, the philosopher defined ‘national identities in exclusive terms by grounding them in characteristics or sentiments that are said to be natural’ (Benner, 2013). This explains so much!

A nation is nothing but an imaginary line that divides two or more geographic areas according to their cultural, political and other differences. To clarify the concept of “nationalism”, Liah Greenfeld suggested in her book Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity that it ‘is a movement and a state of mind that brings together national identity, consciousness, and collectivities’ (Greenfeld, 1992). I find it quite fascinating if I consider the fact that something based on imaginary lines can have such a strong impact on societies. Another thing that particularly captured my attention was learning that Wales can be split into 3 imaginary boundaries, also known as The Three Wales Model according to Denis Balsom . This division is based on the level of “Welshness” of the inhabitants, and the area where I live (North-Western Wales) is by chance the “Welshest” one. Here, unlike the other two areas, almost all the natives speak Welsh. The strength of the overall national identity present within this territory reminds me of the Sicilian one. Unlike Welsh, Sicilian is not taught in schools, since it is considered more as a dialect than an actual language. Despite this difference, the linguistic association ELA (Endangered Language Alliance) argues that: Sicilian is ‘spoken […] on the Italian peninsula, with an estimated 5 million speakers inside Italy (principally in Sicily)’ (Endangered Language Alliance, 2012). This means that not only is Sicilian widely spoken on the island itself (which consists of 5,048,553 inhabitants), but it also extends itself to the closest regions. It is a lot!

Considering the fact nationalism and national identity are strongly bound up, Andreas Eckert mentioned Yves Déloye’s work, when the latter highlighted that:

[The] process of collective identification does not occur in the same way, at the same speed, with the same intensity, or with the same result in every country; each national group “imagines itself” differently, notably because of history, the form and strength of its government, its cultural or religious composition, and the modalities of its involvement on the international scene (Eckert, 2013).

 National identity is commonly expressed by societies through politics, sports, customs and many others. If on the one hand, I find national pride to be essential for the preservation of cultures, on the other hand, I strongly believe in the power of cultural exchange. This is why I wish nationalism to remain a pure feeling for everybody, far from racisms and fears towards different cultures.

I hope you found this post interesting! Let me know if you have any suggestions for the next posts 😊

 Paola.

References

Benner, E. (2013) The Oxford Handbook of The History of Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Eckert, A. (2013) The Oxford Handbook of The History of Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Endangered Language Alliance, ‘Sicilian: a Romance language of Sicily (Italy). Available from http://elalliance.org/languages/italian/sicilian/ [Accessed 15 Mar 2018]

Greenfeld, L. (1992) Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge (Massachusetts): Harvard University Press.

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Are you sure to be entirely human?

Hello everybody and welcome to my blog! It’s been ages since I last owned a blog and I feel pretty excited about this adventure. I am an exchange student at Bangor University (Wales). I decided to attend a Media Culture module since, apart from the anthropologic point of view, I wanted to learn more about the way technologies affect humanity. 

Today I am going to “traumatise” you guys by showing a few points that prove the fact that no human being is really and entirely human. Let’s start!

In 1991 Donna Haraway, a famous American feminist philosopher, published an essay that had extreme success, and that in 2016 was also included in her book called Manifestly Haraway. The title of this essay is A Cyborg Manifesto: science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. In her words ‘we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism—in short, cyborgs’ (Haraway, 1991).

Have you ever thought about the fact that we depend on the tools that we consider “necessary” in our lives? The day I realised that I could never actually live as a “regular” human being if I were deprived of my eyeglasses, was the day I understood what being a cyborg means. Wearing prothesis, alongside taking medications, or yet undergoing plastic surgery is what inevitably makes you a CYBORG. I could write down an endless list of everyday-conditions that make our life a cybernetic experience. This is what the sociologist��Marshall McLuhan meant when he once claimed that technology is nothing but an extension of man.

Speaking of extensions of man, Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows found that ‘a programmatic user’s guide on new technological developments [...] puts it like this: 

‘We are already cyborgs. My mother, for instance, leads a relatively normal life thanks to a pacemaker. Beyond that, genetic engineering and nanotechnology...offer us the possibility of literally being able to change our bodies into new and different forms...a form of postbiological humanity can be achieved within the next fifty years’ (Featherstone and Burrows, 1995).

Interesting, right?

Furthermore, Kevin Kelly argues that:

‘Our ancestors first chipped stone scrapers 2.5 million years ago to give themselves claws. By about 250,000 years ago they devised crude techniques for cooking, or pre-digesting, with fire[…]. [This] permitted them to evolve smaller teeth and smaller jaw muscles and provided more kinds of stuff to eat. Our invention altered us’ (Kelly). 

Kelly’s words are based on the fact that our being cyborgs is basically the result of our being intelligent beings.

If you’ve read this post up until this point, I want you to do me one simple favour: Tomorrow I want you to start making a list of all the tools you are going to use throughout your day (clothes included). After you have done that, I want you to take a deep breath and accept the fact that your day wouldn’t have been the same if those tools would have not taken part in your day.

Have you done it? Well. Now repeat after me: I AM A CYBORG!

I hope you enjoyed my first blog post! I will re-update this blog very soon. Stay tuned! 

ps. sorry! Couldn’t help but posting this creepy GIF! :)

Paola. 

References

Featherstone M. and Burrows R. (1995) Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk. London: SAGE Publications Ltd.

Haraway, D. (2016) Manifestly Haraway. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Kelly, K. ‘Domesticated Cyborgs’, Quiet Babylon. Available from:   http://quietbabylon.com/2010/domesticated-cyborgs-kevin-kelly/ (Accessed 05 Mar 2018)