In Public Parts, Jeff Jarvis tackles the incredibly challenging and important topic of the impact of the internet on privacy and publicness. Jeff calls himself a “publicness advocate” in contrast with the often nameless “privacy advocates” who are cited whenever there is a discussion about a change in how Facebook works or the WSJ goes on an anti-cookie bender. As you can tell, I fall squarely in Jeff’s camp that publicness is largely a good thing (and like Jeff, I blog and tweet and check-in albeit in significantly lower volume than Jeff).
Public Parts starts off with a wonderful historical and cross cultural survey on privacy and publicness. Jeff pulls together information from a broad set of sources and this is a must read for everyone thinking about the topic. It is amazing to see the degree to which these two concepts are socially determined and how much they have changed across time and space. Jeff mentions the contrast between German co-ed saunas and the blurring of houses on Google Streetview as great examples of cultural differences.
Based on this background Jeff looks into what a definition of privacy would look like. He provides powerful challenges to many of the existing attempts at definition. And in the strongest accomplishment of the book goes on to provide an “ethic” of privacy and one of publicness. Instead of abstract definitions, these are concrete behavioral rules. The “ethic of privacy” applies to the recipient of private information, whereas the “ethic of publicness” applies to the potential originator. They could be loosely termed “caring” and “sharing.” If you have received private information you need to take great “care” in what you do with it. Conversely if you have information that might serve the public you need to consider “sharing” it.
Following this are some uneven chapters about privacy and publicness for corporations and government. They are uneven because these are big topics and it is difficult (impossible?) to do them justice in the space Jeff alots to each. As a result there are some relatively mundane parts, e.g. about Best Buy’s use of Twitter for customer service while some important questions aren’t pushed hard enough. For instance, can a company be transparent and yet still have a “strategy”? For much of history, the notion of being “strategic” was intimately tied to information asymmetry. I would have also liked to see more of a discussion of how the copyright and patent systems impact publicness.
These are minor issues though compared to the powerful conception of privacy and publicness as ethics. Anyone thinking about privacy and publicness and how the Internet is changing them should make sure to read Public Parts and also to engage with Jeff in the ongoing discussion he hosts over at his blog buzzmachine.
