The question might seem daft, given how gravely privacy is endangered in our digital age. Spies in government and the private sector routinely devour data for insights into our behavior, insights that may be used to manipulate our behavior. And privacy’s advocates contend that freedom and democracy are unthinkable without it. As philosopher Michael Lynch puts it, privacy affords us control over our thoughts and feelings, which is a “necessary condition for being in a position to make autonomous decisions, for our ability to determine who and what we are as persons.”

This idea—that privacy is an enduring, universal, even sacred virtue—is seductive. But it is wrong, and in a few ways: Privacy is a relatively recent institution, and less than essential to democracy. What’s more, privacy has never been secure; vulnerability is its native state.

Americans may be forgiven for assuming that privacy is a foundational institution in our democracy. You might have read that the nation was spawned, in part, by privacy concerns: colonists rebelled against British troops occupying their homes and invading their warehouses and workplaces. Privacy may not have been quite so central to our founders’ concerns, however. The term is not mentioned in the US Constitution—a right to privacy is never spelled out. In American constitutional law, this right wasn’t articulated until a century after the Revolutionary War, by future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and his law partner Samuel Warren in an 1890 Harvard Law Review article. And privacy only earned a robust legal defense in the 1960s, when the Supreme Court under Earl Warren held that a right to privacy is presumed by the Bill of Rights.

It actually makes sense that privacy was a late arrival to democracy. It seems privacy was more revered, at least early on, as a spatial virtue, rather than a moral one. Historians indicate privacy was conceived as a bourgeois value in the 18th and 19th centuries, born of relative wealth. Premodern homes had few rooms, and certainly few that were designated for single—private—use, like a bathroom or bedroom. People all over the world generally lived in common spaces, which were also quite narrow.

This changed toward the end of the 19th century when a growing middle class demanded homes with multiple rooms into which residents could retreat. As industrialized societies became wealthier, the working class looked to enjoy the same benefits as the wealthy—including privacy. The English ultimately considered it a basic human right for laborers to have homes with private gardens in front and back.

The development and expansion of suburban architecture, especially in America, reflects the gains privacy made in the 20th century. You might say privacy is the central organizing principle of suburbia: houses are removed from the street; sidewalks are a rarity in many suburban neighborhoods, thus limiting intrusion by strangers; socializing happens in fenced-in backyards and spacious basements. Since, the 1970s, the average suburban home has grown by a third, even while the number of its inhabitants has fallen, meaning that suburbanites are practically swimming in private space, which seems to be a basic need.

It is easy to forget how new such standards of privacy are. In 1972, the British government formed a committee to report on the state of privacy. The committee found that “the modern middle-class family … relatively sound-proofed in their semi-detached house, relatively unseen behind their privet hedge … insulated in the family car … are probably more private in the sense of being unnoticed in all their everyday doings than any sizeable section of the population in any other time or place.”

But even as the “Younger Report” (so named because it was chaired by Sir Kenneth Younger, an experienced politician who led several commissions reporting on the state of British society) was claiming that privacy had been achieved in the 20th century as never before, democratic governments were finding new ways to infiltrate their citizens’ lives. In the U.S., historian Sarah Igo explains, that included surveillance of home populations during World War I, public health initiatives that invaded and exposed the homes and lives of the poor, and a growing bureaucracy that aimed to address a host of social ills, from retirement to unemployment to homeownership.

Said bureaucracy ballooned mid-century when the Social Security program was enacted, and assigned identifying numbers to all citizens, rendering them transparent to the government in the process. Many critics and commentators issued dire warnings that echo current concerns for privacy.

“[Our] wage-earning citizens … may well resent a system of surveillance in which every individual among them is kept under the eye of the Federal Government,” one of Social Security’s detractors claimed. “Our people have been accustomed to privacy and freedom of movement.” Likewise, a newspaper column warned readers that “your personal life would be laid bare,” “your life will be an open book,” and “you are to be regimented—catalogued—put on file.”

Such concerns soon evaporated, however. The dangers of lost privacy were unclear, uncertain, unproven; the tradeoff for being documented—namely, you gained a secure retirement—was evident.

In the digital age, these tradeoffs—often made with the active participation of the public—have so thoroughly routed privacy that people now have little expectation of it. Digital spies do not have to work hard to monitor us; this is a new era of sharing. Over the last two decades, consumers have become accustomed to divulging their data in exchange for the conveniences offered by technology. Many people expose intimate and once embarrassing details on social media, as a matter of course. Digital citizens increasingly live their lives in public, for all to see.

This may not be the tragedy that privacy advocates suggest.

I don’t mean to minimize violations of privacy, or to say that it’s not important or cherished—because surveillance does open the door to being taken advantage of, manipulated, or coerced. But I wish to offer this caution from history: privacy has never been essential to human liberty and flourishing; and it has always been threatened, and exceedingly hard to achieve or secure.

By understanding the history of privacy, we can better look to its future, and better evaluate proposals about data control. We should be skeptical, for example, about any law’s ability to protect our privacy—and about our own individual commitments to protecting it. We also should be careful not to oversell privacy as eternal and universal and vital.

If anything, privacy might prove to be a dangerous distraction from more important values. In this digital age, privacy itself can be dangerous when, isolated behind our computer screens, we are swayed by, and moved to magnify, all manner of conspiracies and untruths that undermine democracy. It is not surprising that autocratic regimes have thrived on digital communications, and the division, confusion, and alienation they produce.

The health, welfare, and vibrancy of democracy rely more on the public than the private realm—this has always been the case. How citizens organize in public, how they demonstrate, how they muster the tenacity, courage, and creativity to capture the attention of the populace, and sow the seeds of moral persuasion, this is the basis of our common liberty. We would be wise to relearn and apply this lesson.

The post Why Privacy Might Not Be Worth Protecting appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“You can go, you know,” my colleague replied.

“I would have to cancel class.”

“Don’t cancel class. Teach the inauguration with your cell phone. Your students will love it.”

I did, and I’ve never regretted it.

In our digital age, presidential inaugurations create opportunities to teach and learn intimately together. They bring urgency to the study of history and politics, by connecting the past to the present. They demonstrate how the disquieting power of patriotism, and the way we experience patriotic ritual through media technologies, might be used to mask gross inequities in America’s unraveling social fabric.

Since 2009, I have taught the inauguration every four years as a history-in-the-making event, traveling to Washington, D.C., for both of Obama’s inaugurals and for Donald Trump’s in 2017. I initially taught the event to students in two introductory political science courses. In 2013, I taught it in a digital storytelling course, and in 2017, in two introductory U.S. history courses.

This year, I am teaching the inauguration in an Asian American history course and a historiography seminar. Only this time, heeding COVID-19 restrictions, I am at home today, and will be engaging with students through browser windows. And I am engaging not just with an inauguration, but with the January storming of the Capitol by a violent mob.

How, I’ve been wondering, would I incorporate these events into my teaching?

In planning, I thought about how students and I are likely to remember this insurrection. I also thought about how social media shapes today’s political and historical events.

Back in 2009, instructional technologists at the community college where I then taught helped me set up a learning activity that modeled the Obama campaign’s groundbreaking use of social media to connect voters and candidate. I asked students to watch coverage of the inauguration at home and to communicate with one another and me via email, text messages, Facebook posts, and online class discussion boards. I encouraged them to think about how the processes were creating a sense of community and to consider the long-term potential of these communities to bring about changes they wanted to see in the world during their lifetimes. My hope was that students would build their reflections into an ongoing “vision for the world” project they completed over the term.

Back then, like most teachers, I was occasionally frustrated by the fact that students were using their phones and laptops in class to chat with friends and surf the internet. I sometimes threatened to confiscate the devices, until the 2009 inauguration helped shift my perspective. I started to realize that I could help students and others learn to use the devices to do much more than combat boredom. Community builds through sharing stories, ideas, and thoughts. How do these processes work?

I purchased a Blackberry Curve smart phone and learned how to use it to send and receive emails and text messages as well as take pictures and create short videos.

Obama’s first inauguration on January 20, 2009, drew an estimated 1.8 million people, the largest public event ever at the National Mall. After riding a crowded Metro train and walking for nearly two hours, I made it to the closest available public viewing spot of the Capitol dais where the president, first lady, and chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court would stand for the swearing-in.

I stood with my friend Jenny and my husband, Jim, craning my neck to see a Jumbotron screen some distance away. Aretha Franklin began singing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.”

A red light on the Blackberry Curve blinked. I was receiving a text message from a student.

“Hi Himanee! I’m so excited for you! Where are you standing? Can you see anything?”

“Just a lot of heads, but I can hear Aretha singing. Where are you?”

“Watching TV. What’s going on now?”

Outgoing President George W. Bush appeared. A ripple of boos erupted. The Blackberry blinked again.

“Do you think it’s appropriate to boo g.w. bush?” another student asked via text.

“Well, not really. How about you?”

“It is their right to display their feelings towards the outgoing president but personally I would not boo him. Did you?”

During the course of the day and into that evening, I received about a dozen text messages and 20 emails, and students posted nearly 200 comments on online course discussion boards. They asked whether I had seen protests; whether there were rules regarding the use of religious texts (such as the Bible that had belonged to Lincoln that Obama used in taking the oath of office and in the voicing of prayers); and how I felt as an ethnic minority being at the inauguration. Some who were unhappy with the election results expressed fatigue over hearing Obama’s name over and over again.

These voices braided together captured a history we co-created. Underlying the messages were questions of credibility: Was the crowd I was standing in like the one they saw on TV? Where did race and religion fit in a secular America? And did people who did not like the new president fit into this America? In this sense, I learned the students were not passive observers but rather—with the help of technology—active participants.

My own combination of being on site while participating with my students online also taught me a few striking lessons.

In 2008, I had imagined a sort of kinship with Obama, at least in part because Obama’s campaign had created this sense of relationship through its relentless use of the same communicative tools I was now using to teach. I saw him as his campaign portrayed him to me: as a community organizer, a basketball player, the first “hip-hop president,” a person who was about the same age as me and was non-white, like me.

At the inauguration, a different Obama surfaced: a flag-loving commander-in-chief of armed forces in a geopolitically powerful America. American flags lined the Capitol as well as the steps leading down to reflecting pools and the Mall pathways, and the firing of a cannon followed after Obama took the oath of office.

I asked myself if this was my vision for America. Or was my vision the crowd of people around me—the people huddled in coats, stomping their feet to stay warm; the small child holding the hands of his parents and chanting “Obama! Obama!”?

I learned later that even though the inauguration was a public event, a select group of people had better seats. Members of Congress receive color-coded “tickets” that they typically distribute to their monied supporters, staff, and campaign volunteers. The public viewing areas begin where the ticketed spots end.

This deeper understanding of the inaugural made me want to keep using it as a classroom tool. Nearly four years later, in fall 2012, I was an assistant professor at SUNY Empire State College in upstate New York, teaching digital storytelling. My students were learning online and using the tools that once had been distractions for multiple uses.

My class began one day after the inauguration and was fully online, so I took a different approach. First, my co-teacher and I initiated a collective story using a platform called StoryTimed. We began the story—my colleague from her home in Buffalo, and me in D.C, a few days before the inauguration. Then we let the students take over. I also expanded the definition of classroom to include my entire social network of friends and colleagues via Facebook and Twitter. And, finally, an undergraduate whom I invited to participate added a steady stream of comments to my Facebook event and posted updates I sent her by text when the internet lines jammed in D.C. Unable to immediately access the digital conversation, I immersed myself in what was happening around me.

As with 2009, flags and military salutes etched the edges of the ceremony’s narrative. These images evoked 20th-century political scientist Benedict Anderson’s idea of imagined community, where people who do not know each other imagine the nation into being through a tacit agreement to imbue shared symbols with meaning. That idea carries a sinister warning, Anderson argues, in that it can lead masses of people into a blind love for the nation and its representative symbols— flags, artillery, the president—and a forgetting of the often violent and inequitable underpinnings of that nation’s existence. In 2013, I stood in a mostly African American and mostly women crowd—a group of college students, teachers, and community organizers. We did not know each other, but we came together, singing “Amazing Grace” and repeating lines that flashed across a Jumbotron screen about the nation’s potential to heal. When Obama and his family appeared, we cheered with joy.

Crowd exiting a Metro station and trying to get to the Mall in 2013. Courtesy of the author.

“Here come Malia and Sasha,” I said in a message posted to Facebook. “This is a very loved family. You can feel it. It’s like we know them ourselves!”

“Here comes the President!!!” posted my student.

“Obama looks like he’s loving this moment. He was just announced and when he broke out into a grin, the crowd exploded,” I replied.

I left feeling as if I had attended a spiritual gathering, with a renewed consciousness of the power that community could wield. I just hoped it would not blind me or anyone else to the deep inequities that remain in America’s social fabric.

Well in advance of the 2016 election, I arranged to teach the 2017 inauguration to two U.S. history classes. My plan this time was to start the conversations on election night and to sustain them in the days leading up to and following the inaugural ceremonies, in hopes that students would find continual connections between past and present, and would reflect on how both could help them find future ways to participate in civic life.

Students dug into the history of the Electoral College, wrote essays exploring the post-Civil War Reconstruction and its relationship to the nation’s present divisiveness, and engaged in discussions with me throughout the long night in which Donald Trump emerged victorious.

For the week of the inauguration, I asked them to view and discuss online virtual exhibits at the Smithsonian’s history museums while I shared discoveries I made while visiting in person. We conversed via Twitter and Facebook not only about the inauguration but also about the Women’s March that took place the day after. Many students participated in women’s marches in their communities, and shared pictures and comments.

Students were curious about the size of the crowd and whether it was as racially and ethnically mixed as those at Obama’s ceremonies. They also asked me if I had seen any protests or violence and urged me to stay safe. The Trump supporters I did encounter, however, were congenial. We talked on the Metro and in lines at security gates before entering the Mall about the weather, the festivities, and “the rich people” who had tickets. Around me, the gathering was sparse and mostly white, reflecting the differences between the nation that Trump supporters were imagining into being and myself. Students quoted snippets of Trump’s short speech and expressed wishes for the nation’s divisiveness to end. After the ceremony, I lingered by a Jumbotron screen, watching the Obamas depart the White House in a military helicopter. As the helicopter flew over the Mall, I impulsively started running with a few others toward it, arms in the air, waving good-bye.

The 2021 inauguration is expected to be a limited live event with heavy security. The National Mall has been closed, and only members of Congress will be present. Trump has said he will not attend Biden’s inauguration, the first departing president to deny his successor such a courtesy in 152 years.

Classes started again this week. On Tuesday, I asked students to take part in a dialogue being hosted by my college on the historic significance of Kamala Harris’s election. Today, I plan to teach the inauguration by asking students to join me at https://bideninaugural.org, where the event will be livestreamed. We will converse together on in-class discussion boards, and I plan to ask them to reflect on how to write the history of this inauguration for the generation to follow.

In preparation, I’ve been thinking a lot about something I expect to see on the livestream: the face masks we’ve all been asked to wear in public to slow the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

In this tense moment, perhaps the mask might emerge as a new symbol of a new kind of nation. Wearing a mask is like making a sacrifice. It’s done to protect others from contracting the coronavirus, should you be carrying it. It is a call to work together to help the world heal.

The post How to Teach an American Inauguration appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

A generation later, newspaperman and political commentator Walter Lippmann observed that people “live in the same world, but they think and feel in different ones,” anticipating our current concerns about “media bubbles” by almost a century.

Yet the revolution in digital communication initially generated more enthusiasm than anxiety. Many believed that the internet would enhance rather than diminish democratic citizenship by empowering ordinary citizens, bypassing institutional gatekeepers, enabling bottom-up mobilization and lateral communication, and making politics more transparent. It would thus foster more responsive government and enable more participatory forms of citizenship. Some forecasted that it would undermine authoritarian regimes, and indeed it was only a few years ago that commentators were celebrating the role of Twitter and Facebook in the Arab Spring.

Today the mood is much darker: The digital dream of renewing democratic citizenship has given way to a digital nightmare of undermining democratic citizenship. And not just because of Donald Trump, who is a symptom as much as a cause. It’s important to look beyond Trump—and beyond the discussions of fake news and Russian manipulation—to broader developments that have created a crisis of public knowledge.

The last decade has seen a transition from connectivity to hyperconnectivity. The share of the United States population over age 14 with a smartphone soared from a mere 11 percent at the end of 2008 to 75 percent at the end of 2014. The same period saw the explosive growth of social media. Regular Facebook users amounted to only 13 percent of the U.S. population at the end of 2008, but just four years later they made up more than half the population (and of course a much higher fraction among younger people). Worldwide, Facebook had 10 times as many users by the end of last year—nearly 2 billion—as it had in 2009. Twitter users increased more than six-fold in the United States from 2010 to 2014, growing from 10 million to 63 million. More Americans under 50 today regularly get news online than from television.

Hyperconnectivity is not just a technological fact; it is shaped by—and shapes in turn—economics, politics, law, and culture as well. Our current regime of connectivity is based on digital surveillance—which has rightly been described as the dominant business model of the Internet economy. The core of this business model is the extraction of massive amounts of personal data from users in exchange for nominally free services.

This intensifying and ever more sophisticated system of corporate surveillance is more comprehensive and arguably more insidious than even the most powerful systems of government surveillance. It not only enables micro-targeted (and therefore more valuable) commercial advertising. More ominously, this system of surveillance enables micro-targeted and customized political advertising. It’s true that the claims of Cambridge Analytica to have decisively helped elect Donald Trump through such micro-targeting have been debunked. But increasingly sophisticated forms of data aggregation and analysis, which allow increasingly accurate inferences about individuals’ traits and dispositions, have undoubtedly made possible forms of customizable micro-targeting that pose new threats to the public sphere and democratic decision-making.

The threat goes well beyond the issue of fake news. Manipulative and non-transparent micro-targeting threatens democratic decision-making regardless of whether the targeted message contains false information.

Democracy depends on public discussion and argument. If political persuasion operates behind the scenes through individualized targeting, it becomes inaccessible to public debate. The individual herself is unaware of being targeted, and since the message is invisible to others, it cannot be engaged or countered.

The threat also goes beyond targeted political advertising. Digital surveillance enables micro-targeted and customized content of all kinds, including news stories that are specifically tailored to the recipient. Such customized news content may be presented as part of a broader, putatively non-political effort to produce and deliver personally relevant information. But even if it is not intended to persuade, customized news challenges the very idea of the publicness of news, and it builds fragmentation—and even privatization—into the basic practices of the digital ecosystem.

The intensification of digital surveillance is driven by the relentlessly commercialized competition for attention. Obviously, this is not new—getting attention has been central to mass journalism for more than a century. What’s new is the way in which attention is more pervasively and precisely measured, more precisely tracked across time and context, and more precisely monetized than ever before. The ubiquitous measurement, tracking, and monetization of attention have enshrined popularity as the ultimate measure of value (and virality as the highest form of popularity).

In the media systems of both Europe and North America, the commercial logic of popularity has coexisted in recent decades with a professional logic of appropriateness, newsworthiness, objectivity, and—at its best—critical inquiry. But now the logic of popularity is entirely dominant, and not only in online media. As Leslie Moonves, the head of CBS, memorably commented in early 2016, the Trump campaign “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

Moreover, the metrics of popularity can be gamed and manipulated. Popularity can be manufactured, for example, by using bots to flood Twitter with messages and gain visibility as a “trending topic.” This manipulated visibility can then become self-reinforcing if the topic is picked up—as trending Twitter topics often are—by journalists.

There is a deep affinity between the commercial logic of popularity in a hyper-connected digital ecosystem and the cultural and political logic of populism. Populism is an ideology of immediacy or direct access. It challenges gatekeepers and mediating institutions—political parties, professional expertise, and the mainstream media—in the name of “direct access” to knowledge, direct access to culture, and direct access to political decision-making.

Digital hyperconnectivity seems to facilitate precisely such direct access. It seems to be based on disintermediation—on bypassing gatekeepers of all kinds and directly connecting everybody to everyone and everything (including all “the world’s information,” which Google’s famous mission statement claims to make “universally accessible”). Insofar as there is an ideology of hyperconnectivity, it is precisely a populist ideology, an ideology of disintermediation.

But in fact hyperconnectivity simply replaces one mode of mediation with another. In the domain of news, it tends to replace mediation and filtering based on professional judgment with mediation and filtering based on metrics and algorithms. Who sees what—in Facebook news feeds or Google search results—is not neutral or unfiltered. Rather, who sees what is governed by complex and utterly nontransparent proprietary algorithms.

The affinity between the commercial logic of popularity and the cultural and political logic of populism has another side. The pursuit of popularity in a hyper-connected digital environment accentuates the populist style of communication that already characterized media-driven forms of political communication well before the internet age—a style characterized by dramatization, confrontation, negativity, emotionalization, personalization, visualization, and hyper-simplification.

The sheer superabundance of content that courses through the digital ecosystem also erodes democratic citizenship. Digital abundance is at once polarizing and paralyzing. There has been much talk of Internet-based filter bubbles and echo chambers that segregate the public into separate cognitive, emotional, and political worlds. But polarization depends on colliding worlds, not on sealed and separate worlds. It depends on mobilization against a despised, feared, or loathed “other.” Digital superabundance facilitates such polarizing mobilization by assuring an inexhaustible and continuously renewed supply of discrediting representations of “the other.” Breitbart News, for example, sustains a continuous stream of stories attacking liberals, leftists, multiculturalists, Muslims, the mainstream press, as well as anyone else who attacks Trump.

Abundance also can be paralyzing. Research suggests that most people are more exposed to contrary views than the theory of filter bubbles would suggest. But this does not mean that they are critically assessing alternative perspectives. The sheer profusion and hyper-availability of radically different views of the world—not just differing opinions or “alternative facts”—can overwhelm people’s limited capacities for critical appraisal and paralyze their faculties of judgment and discernment. Digital superabundance, in other words, can create a “blanket of fog.” Inundated in a sea of information, pseudo-information, misinformation, and disinformation, people may feel powerless to cut through the fog and assess competing claims. And declining trust in the media—as well as declining participation in the interpretive communities fostered by churches, unions, parties, and other mediating institutions—may lead many people to retreat into a stance of generalized distrust.

Digital hyperconnectivity has created a media and information ecosystem that is distinctively vulnerable to the propagation of fake news in the service of profit or propaganda. But fake news is only the tip of a much larger iceberg.

The social mediatization of politics, the intensifying web of surveillance and micro-targeting, the marginalization of institutional gatekeepers, the substitution of algorithms for professional judgment, the relentless pursuit and ubiquitous measurement of popularity, the accentuation of a populist style of communication, and the sheer superabundance of information, misinformation, and disinformation—all these developments have contributed to a crisis of public knowledge.

The institutions that generate, refine, assess, popularize, and disseminate knowledge—science, universities, and the mainstream and elite media—have suffered a massive loss in public trust and legitimacy. The digital ecosystem that incubates and circulates what purports to be knowledge is increasingly disconnected from these institutions. A mood of “epistemological populism” breeds a pervasive suspicion of expertise. Deep gaps divide the views of scientists from those of the public about subjects such as evolution, the causes of climate change, the safety of vaccines, and the safety of genetically modified foods. Robust conceptions of democratic citizenship are unthinkable without at least minimal assumptions about public knowledge and deliberative reason. But today even the most attenuated assumptions seem wholly untenable.

What can be done? First, since manifestly false news stories are just a symptom or indicator of a deeper and more systemic problem of public knowledge, strategies for addressing this problem must address this larger problem and not focus solely on fake news. Second, the problem is not simply technological but economic, political, and cultural. For this reason, we cannot simply look for technological fixes.

Third, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms must be held accountable as public institutions and de facto news publishers. They cannot be allowed to hide behind the claim that they are just neutral platforms, responsible only to their users for optimizing their experience. Just what form this broader public accountability should take is a difficult and complex question. But it is certainly not sufficient for Facebook to step up ex-post fact-checking on stories that have been flagged as problematic. That is too little, too late.

Fourth, the crisis of public knowledge makes it urgent to strengthen public broadcasting and other forms of public journalism. The commitment to public journalism has been weakening in recent decades in Europe and the United States. But now more than ever, that commitment must be renewed.

Lastly, we need to invent and invest in new forms of civic education that would seek to cultivate the new forms of literacy, numeracy, and critical intelligence that are needed for democratic citizenship in an age of digital hyperconnectivity. And we need new efforts to reclaim and rebuild a space of genuinely public discussion and debate to counter the growing fragmentation, privatization, and polarization of the digital ecosystem.

The post Forget Fake News. Social Media Is Making Democracy Less Democratic. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.