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Abstract
Blogs are permeating most niches of social life, and addressing a wide range of topics from scholarly and political issuesFootnote1 to family and children's daily lives. By their very nature, blogs raise a number of privacy issues as they are easy to produce and disseminate, resulting in large amounts of sometimes personal information being broadcast across the Internet in a persistent and cumulative manner. This article reports the preliminary findings of an online survey of bloggers from around the world. The survey explored bloggers' subjective sense of privacy by examining their blogging practices and their expectations of privacy when publishing online. The findings suggest that blogging offers individuals a unique opportunity to work on their self-identity via the degree of self-expression and social interaction that is available in this medium. This finding helps to explain why bloggers consciously bring the ‘private’ to the public realm, despite the inherent privacy risks they face in doing so.
Notes
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3. The literature on privacy is vast. Legal, historical, sociological and policy-centred approaches are all available. This discussion centres on the function of privacy and therefore focuses on the philosophical debate.
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14. Ibid., 62.
15. Ibid., 78.
16. Ibid., 75.
17. Ibid., 75.
18. Ibid., 76.
19. Benn, S I (Citation1984) Privacy, freedom, and respect for persons, in F D Schoeman (ed) (Citation1984) Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy: An Anthology: New York: Cambridge University Press, 223–244; Prosser, W L (Citation1960) Privacy, California Law Review, 48(3), 338, reprinted in F D Schoeman (ed) (Citation1984) Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy: An Anthology, New York: Cambridge University Press, 104–155; Reiman, J H (Citation1978) Privacy, intimacy, and personhood, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 6(1), 26, reprinted in F D Schoeman (ed) (1984) Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy: An Anthology, New York: Cambridge University Press, 300–316.
20. Schoeman, F D Privacy and Social Freedom, op cit, fn 21, 15.
21. Goffman, E (Citation1963) Behaviour in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings, New York: The Free Press; Goffman, E (Citation1969) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, London: Penguin.
22. Fried, C (Citation1968) Privacy, Yale Law Journal, 77(3), 475, reprinted in F D Schoeman (ed) Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy: An Anthology, New York: Cambridge University Press, 203–223; Gerstein, R G (Citation1978) Intimacy and privacy, Ethics, 89(1), 76, in F D Schoeman, (ed) (1984) Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy: An Anthology, New York: Cambridge University Press, 265–272; Reiman, J H, op cit, fn 19.
23. Giddens, A (Citation1994) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
24. Ibid., 54.
25. Ibid., 185.
26. Ibid., 186.
27. Ibid., 148.
28. Manchester University, Manchester Metropolitan University (student mail list), and Queen's University Belfast (computer and law students only).
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30. Combination of married and living together.
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33. Herring, S C, Scheidt, L A, Bonus, S. and Wright, E (2004a) Bridging the gap: a genre analysis of weblogs, Proceedings of the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-37), Los Alamitos: IEEE Computer Society Press. Available at< http://www.blogninja.com/DDGDD04.doc>. Accessed 27 February 2008.
34. Ibid., 10.
35. Herring, S C, Kouper, I, Scheidt, L A. and Wright, E (2004b) Women and children last: the discursive construction of weblogs, in L Gurak, S Antonijevic, L Johnson, C Ratliff and J Reyman (eds), Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs. Available at <http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/women_and_children.html>. Last accessed 27 February 2008.
36. Nardi, B, Schiano, D, and Gumbrecht, M (2004) Blogging as social activity, or, would you let 900 million people read your diary?, Proceedings of Computer Supported Cooperative Work 2004. Available at <http://home.comcast.net/%7Ediane.schiano/CSCW04.Blog.pdf>, 4. Accessed 27 February 2008.
37. Nardi, B, Schiano, D, and Gumbrecht, M (2004) Blogging as social activity, or, would you let 900 million people read your diary?, Proceedings of Computer Supported Cooperative Work 2004. Available at <http://home.comcast.net/%7Ediane.schiano/CSCW04.Blog.pdf>, 6. Accessed 27 February 2008.
38. Gumbrecht, M (2004) Blogs as ‘protected space’, WWW2004 Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem: Aggregation, Analysis and Dynamics. Available at< http://www.blogpulse.com/papers/www2004gumbrecht.pdf>. Accessed 27 February 2008.
39. Palen, L and Dourish, P (2003) Unpacking ‘privacy’ for a networked world, Proceedings of the ACM CHI. Available at <http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/650000/642635/p129-palen.pdf?key1=642635&key2=7273414711&coll=&dl=GUIDE&CFID=15151515&CFTOKEN=6184618>. Accessed 27 February 2008.
40. Rosen, J (2000) The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America, Vintage Books: New York.
41. Grudin, J (2001) Desituating action: digital representation of context, Human-Computer Interaction, 16(2–3), 269–286.
42. Op cit, fn 41.
43. Grudin, J (2001) Desituating action: digital representation of context, Human-Computer Interaction, 16(2–3), 269–286.
44. Grudin, J (Citation2001) Desituating action: digital representation of context, Human-Computer Interaction, 16(2–3), 11.
45. Rosen, J (2000) The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America, New York: NY: Vintage Books.