Paper presented to 2012 New York regional meeting of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations.

1. Civilization and its disconnects:
Privacy, publicity and electronic
media
Privacy, publicity and electronic
media
Dr David Patman
University of Melbourne
1

2. Overview
• Privacy versus publicity
• Historical, cultural, psychoanalytic perspectives
• McLuhan and media effects
• Privacy in tribal, industrial and electronic media
cultures
• Media containers and media content
• Future possibilities for media and psychoanalysis
• Social media as symptom
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3. Privacy vs Publicity
• A central dilemma for users of electronic
communications technology.
• Some feel that electronic media are intruding into
our lives - CCTV, television, mobile phones, email.
• Yet, many people seem prepared to share the most
personal (and often most mundane) aspects of
their lives via social media.
• For other users this too can feel like an annoying
invasion of ‘personal’ space.
3

4. Why I gave up Facebook
“Online, social networks instruct
us to share whenever there's
'something on our mind', no
matter how ignorant or ill
considered, and then help us
broadcast it to the widest
possible audience. Every day each
of us is bombarded by other
people's random thoughts. We
start to see such effusions as
natural.”
Sherry Turkle, Alone Together)
4

5. Over-sharing is NSFW
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6. Social media management
is big business
“Social media offers tempting
opportunities to interact with
employees, business partners,
customers, prospects and a whole
host of anonymous participants on
the social Web…However, those
who participate in social media need
guidance from their employer about
the rules, responsibilities, 'norms'
and behaviors expected of them”
(Gartner, Seven Critical Questions to
Ask Before Developing a Social Media
Policy, 2011)
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7. "Publication is a self-
invasion of privacy"
In a society which appears to
place such a high value on
privacy and the protection of
personal information, why is
that so many people seem
willing, if not eager, to publicly
share intimate details of their
private lives via social media?
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8. A (very) brief history of
privacy
• Property: Physical space can be owned by private individuals
emerged with English Enclosure Acts in 1700s – removed access
to ‘the commons’ and assigned to private landowners. Laws to
protect the ‘right to be let alone’ (e.g. Fourth Amendment)
• Personal: Parts of the body that might be ‘private’ (and indecent,
offensive or shameful) a feature of ‘civilized’ society. Protected by
architecture, clothing, manners, some decency laws.
• Both depend on the ability to define and control access across a
boundary - associated with ‘power’
• Violation of boundary between public and private evokes anxiety,
outrage and moral panic: felt to be unlawful, improper, indecent,
pathological (e.g.‘exhibitionism’ and ‘voyeurism’)
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9. Privacy across cultures
• No agreed definition – from
Latin privatus – to
separate/deprive
• No word for privacy in some
languages (e.g. Russian).
• Public toilets and public hospitals
in China really are ‘public’
• In medieval Europe, the poor
lived together in one room
• Privacy associated with phonetic
literacy
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10. Information privacy
“Instantaneous photographs and
newspaper enterprise have
invaded the sacred precincts of
private and domestic life; and
numerous mechanical devices
threaten to make good the
prediction that ‘what is
whispered in the closet shall be
proclaimed from the house-
tops’” Warren and Brandeis,
Harvard Law Review (1891)
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11. Information privacy
• Concept relatively new - emerged in response to ‘yellow
journalism’ based on telegraphic wire services which deliver
information instantaneously
• Focus of present day privacy statutes
• Extends principles of private property to idea that we should
have rights over information about us
• Various statutes to protect information: mail tampering,
surveillance, identity fraud, government records, intellectual
property
• Also extended to unsolicited information entering private
realm that might be offensive or dangerous, e.g. Spam
11

12. Privacy - game over?
"If you have something you don't
want anyone to know, maybe you
shouldn't be doing it in the first
place"
Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google
"The age of privacy is over"
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and
founder of Facebook
12

13. Privacy and
psychoanalysis
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14. Privacy and
psychoanalysis
“Some say [loss of privacy] is a
nonissue; they point out that privacy
is a historically new idea. This is
true. But although historically new,
privacy has well served our modern
notions of intimacy and democracy.
Without privacy, the borders of
intimacy blur. And, of course, when
all information is collected, everyone
can be turned into an informer”
Sherry Turkle, Alone Together
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15. Privacy and
psychoanalysis
• Norman Holland: The pseudonymity of identity protects users
from real consequences, encouraging over-sexualized and overly
aggressive behavior (flirting and flaming) – ‘the internet regression’
• Sherry Turkle: The ability to ‘broadcast the self’ lures one into
narcissistic self-absorption. We become dependent on our devices.
Virtual, machine-mediated relationships become substitutes for the
real thing – users are ‘alone together’.
• Bonnie Litowitz: Electronic media undermines authority, giving
the pleasure principle free rein – the return of the repressed.
• Aaron Balick: Permanence and hyper-availability of searchable data
on people disrupts stable sense of self - 'virtual impingement'.
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16. Privacy and
psychoanalysis
• Common theme is regression
• There are cases of dependence,
obsession, ‘cyber-bullying’ and
other pathological behavior
online
• But also cases where the
internet has been used
creatively (e.g. sharing
knowledge, building virtual
communities, taking collective
action, peaceful revolution – see
Philip Boxer and Clay Shirky)
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17. McLuhan and media
effects
“The printing press, the computer, and
television are not ... simply machines
which convey information. They are
metaphors through which we
conceptualize reality in one way or
another. They will classify the world for
us, sequence it, frame it, enlarge it, reduce
it, argue a case for what it is like. Through
these media metaphors, we do not see
the world as it is. We see it as our coding
systems are. Such is the power of the
form of information.”
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding media
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18. McLuhan and media
effects
• Mental life has its origins interplay of material deriving from the
physical senses (e.g. Beta elements?)
• We have a ‘sensory ratio’ – when one sense is stimulated, the
others are dulled (e.g. dentists use ‘audiac’ as anaesthetic)
• Media extend and amplify the physical senses. If one sense is
stimulated or flooded, the others are dulled to
‘unconsciousness’ (e.g. as in hypnosis, or sleep)
• The sensory ratio – and therefore experience - in any society
is related to its media mix
• Media are the means of reproduction of particular 'ways of
being'
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19. Audio-tactile immersion
in the collective mind
• Media: speech, songs, dreams, dance, touch (grooming)
• Images and words have magical resonant quality
• Experience is immersive, everyone involved with everyone
else (village)
• Communal rather than individual identity
• Space is 'acoustic' (surround) - motif is mosaic
• Time cyclic rather than linear
• Common areas, but no privacy as we know it
• Associated with ‘tribal’ cultures, primitive - like Ba group?
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20. Visual culture and
civilized society
• Media: written and printed word
• Phonetic alphabet splits meaning from symbols
• Experience is split into public and private domains, subject and
object
• Individual subjects with 'points of view', related to each other
through systems, specialist roles, institutions, laws
• Space is 'optic' (directional, individual-centric) - motif is
hierarchy
• Time is uniform and sequential
• Associated with civil society, rationality, science
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21. Visual culture and
civilized society
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22. The privatized self -
alone together
• “Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins
with the division of labor”
• The main effect of print technology, according to McLuhan, is to
split off the 'public individual' as a distinct, and self-aware entity.
• Private individuals relate to each other through logic and
rationality and, together, constitute a kind of social machine.
• However, for the components of the machine to work in
harmony, the messy parts of experience (associated with sound,
touch, taste and smell) must be split off into an area which can't
be seen - the realm of the 'private’.
• Civilization enacts a kind of repression
22

23. Electronic tribes and the
global village
• McLuhan: The speed of electricity extends the whole central
nervous system outside the body
• Electric media are reversing the process of splitting enacted
by visual culture, returning us to audio-tactile culture
• Begun with telegraph and telephone, amplified by radio and
TV
• The motif is again the mosaic (or matrix): the organic web as
opposed to the mechanical system
• Parallel with difference between classical and quantum
physics
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24. Electronic tribes and
the global village
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25. Electronic tribes and the
global village
• OMG she got FB frnds
tatts on hr arm LOL
• WTF?? :0
• asdkfdksdhslk!!!
• HAHA Pwned :-)
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26. Media containers and
content
• “Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the
media by which we communicate than by the content of the
communication” (e.g. electric light)
• Media are containers for the externalization (‘extension’) of
parts of the self
• These parts (‘content’) are misrecognized (‘repressed) as
‘other’ in a kind of projective identification
• Media content exerts a narcissistic fascination which blinds us
to the unconscious effects of the medium itself
• The internet is the medium - social media is one aspect of its
content
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27. Social media is content
The internet is the medium
The internet is the medium
• The internet allows people to be
involved in each others lives (as do
other electronic media such as TV,
radio, the telephone).
• Fast networks, cheap memory,
increased processing power have
sped up this involvement
• Social media are like TV programs
on the internet – they offer a kind
of ‘plot structure’
• Structure is often consistent with
the patterns of the old print-based
media (e.g. Facebook timeline is like
'sands through the hourglass')
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28. Future possibilities
• “If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is
the century of the psychiatrist's couch”
• Psychoanalysis adopted on the cusp of the electronic age.
• Consulting room restores the auditory (speech) and tactile (couch)
qualities of experience. The analyst provides an imagined and
responsive audience for the 'user's' emotional
projection/communications.
• Perhaps Internet users seeking a parallel experience through social
media - to get back in touch with split off parts of the self?
• Can we discover a form of electronic media which offers a parallel
opportunity for collective reflection on, and reconnection with,
what has been repressed by ci-visualization?
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29. The interpretation of
memes
• Patterns and rhythms in internet
content which express and amplify
shared feelings and preoccupations
• These are magnified or amplified
through content which goes viral, or
becomes a 'meme'. (e.g. Lolcats)
• These have meaning and can provide
insight into social dynamics of our era
(similar to Beradt’s 3rd Reich of
dreams)
• e.g. 'binders full of women' – tells us
something about Romney but also
about ourselves
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30. Social media as symptom
• "Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do
today's job with yesterday's tools and yesterday's concepts"
• Mismatch between Industrial Age organization rules and structures
and new electronic environment - focus of group relations?
• Opportunity to use electronic media as a tool for self-reflection -
like a Listening Post
• Use of social media at work (in ways which seem damaging rather
than productive) highlight a point at which the organization has been
unable to provide requisite containment
• Defence is to shut down, make more repressive rules - can we help
build more reflective cultures?
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