who wants to know

It's been another thought-provoking International Communication Association annual conference. Among other effects, it's caused me to consider writing half-formed thoughts in this blog. Basically, these thoughts would be tweets but for that lack of brevity. Perhaps they'll take the form of rants, provocations, or polemics.

So, privacy. About six years ago, I blogged about the topic. My opinion on the matter (that is, my opposition to privacy absolutism) has not changed, nor (frustratingly) has the public "debate" about privacy. Mostly, I get the sense that privacy situationalists are an increasingly rare breed. Privacy seems to be an issue on which many on the left and right agree: very few people want other people spying on them. On the aforementioned entry, I raised one possible benefit of living in a world where we occasionally ceded our privacy to trusted authorities: reduced threat of being attacked through judicious use of surveillance. Another payoff of relinquishing privacy I wrote about might be an increased tendency to select options with delayed payoff: when no one is watching, you're more inclined to indulge in immediate gratification (fine in moderation, but not so good if it's all you're choosing).

Here's another possible downside to privacy absolutism. Privacy, carried to an extreme, negates our knowledge of one another. If we become distrustful of one another, no pollster, researchers, policy maker, etc. will be able to know anything about human behavior and be able to produce empirical evidence of how we think, feel, and behave. In some sense, privacy is the enemy of knowledge of human behavior.

I suppose there's an alternative though, one I've been exploring recently: the quantified self. It's amazing what we can learn just by tracking our own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Still, I sense that there are limits to what this approach can produce. We can understand ourselves through these means, but can we understand each other? If privacy concerns limit our approach to understanding human behavior to self-knowledge, I sense that we'll lose something important.