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Privacy from political and psychological perspectives and how this concept has been affected by the development of the Web

I am attempting to ascertain the psychological and political concepts and epistemological principles relating to the issue of privacy and in accordance how they can be applied to conceptions of privacy matters on the web. My aim will be to determine whether or not these disciplines compliment or contradict each other in relation to this issue.

For the psychology part of my study I am largely going to undertake my research in the area of ‘The Self’ which is an established psychological school of thought, specifically the notion of the ‘Private Vs Public Self’. There could be a contrast between the two perceptions of individuals characters which the web could be helping to masquerade. For e.g. A person could have a hectic ‘online’ life and appear popular with lots of friends on Facebook or Myspace and not be concerned about their personal and sensitive information being apparent for all to see but in the real world be a closed and private person. On the other hand someone may utilize the web to conceal the parts of their self that they don’t want to share, thus they would be more anxious about themselves being afforded adequate privacy on the web.

Core textbooks –

• Leary, R. & Tangney, J.P. (2003),Handbook of Self and Identity, The Guildford Press: New York.

• Sedikides, C. The Self

For the political part of my studies I am focusing on core undergraduate textbooks in order to obtain a basic understanding of the main principles relating to political matters which can be applied or linked to privacy issues. I am making a start in the area of security networks and I have a particular interest in establishing the fundamental principles and ideas that influence the development of these networks. What are there priorities and what are there goals? Also with all the current furore of Governments ‘snooping’ on its citizens via technological means is it possible to determine whether national security is paramount over individual privacy?

• Boucher, D. & Kelly, P. (2003), Political Thinkers – From Socrates to the Present’, Oxford University Press.

• Collins, A. (2007), Contemporary Security Studies, Oxford University Press.

I am also conducting some reading of books which deal with establishing the notion of privacy and how this concept has differed in light of growing technological advances. The two books which I am currently reading are:

• Kieron O’Hara and Nigel Shadbolt,

  The Spy in the Coffee Machine – The end of privacy as we know it.

• Hal Abelson, Ken Ledeen and Harry Lewis, Blown to bits –

  Your life liberty and happiness after the digital explosion.

  
  

  
  

  
  

  
  

  
  

It won’t be a surprise to anyone who sat in that class when we discussed our chosen topic that I found choosing really difficult. My problem fundamentally stemmed from one basic question: How can I examine A (the topic) through B and C (Disciplines 1 and 2) when I have no prior knowledge on any of them?  Add then to that the fact you’d hope the topics or disciplines had at least some relevance to something you might want to do in the future, or even just tickle your fancy…at least long enough for you not to immediately lose interest in all three. I was also afraid of my topic being too (for lack of a better word) ambitious, that the perspectives I was hoping to look at the topic from where too specialist or too wide, and I wouldn’t get a clear idea of anything. Yes, yes, that’s right, in other words, I was afraid of failing spectacularly.

After not-so-much brainstorming and much more just blurting out half-baked ideas, I have made the decision to go with a topic that I am very excited about. The two disciplines that I’m going to dip into are Psychology and AI. I’ve started doing some preliminary reading but nothing that I would confidently add to the bibliography as of yet…The most promising leads are from the seminar on Cognition and the Semantic Web I attended at Soton.ac.uk before term started, as well as some of the material we covered with Craig in his “Psychology 101” session last week in the coffee room. Having read some of the other blog posts as well, I’m hoping to chat to some of you in the next couple of days.

I have chosen Identity as my issue to study, and will examine this from a psychological and (socio-cultural) anthropological perspective. I am interested in the effect that the Web can have on different cultures and different people, so I think these two disciplines fit nicely with that interest and will hopefully build up a solid background in part of a wide area that I am keen on studying for my dissertation. The two disciplines should allow me to contrast what psychology says about the identity of the individual, with the theories of anthropology regarding the formation of cultural identity.

I will begin by reading the basic textbooks in each area:

• Handbook of Self and Identity by Leary, M and Tangney, P
• The Self by Sedikides, C
• Cultural Anthropology A Contemporary Perspective by Keesing, R and Strathern, A
• Small places, large issues : an introduction to social and cultural anthropology by Eriksen, T

Hopefully these will be a good start and direct me to other important books in this area!

Given the fact it helps understand so many of the issues I am interested in it is very difficult for me to avoid sociology. For alternatives, I am thinking about psychology/social psychology/neural psychology/biology. I need an issue that requires different explanations from these fields. Addiction, for example is understood as a biological phenomenon but it also needs certain environmental conditions before it escalates. I am sceptical about claims that overuse of the web can somehow alter the chemistry or structure of the brain. Therefore, I am also interested in investigating neural plasticity. This would give me an entry point into neural psychology however; it is hard to think of another discipline that would intersect this research. Perhaps a telescopic view would understand why this issue is given any attention at all. I.e. why does the media endorse and thrive on such stories?

This last blog post is purely anecdotal, and discussion some of the concepts uncovered as part of the IDR.

Interestingly one thing that is often spoken about in organisations is team-work. I had hoped to include a small paragraph about why organisations are keen to promote good team work and value members or employees with good team work skills. I couldn’t find any good chapters from either psychology or sociology to define it or discuss the mechanisms involved. This led to my own late realisation (rather than any serendipitous discovery) that teamwork is really a buzz word, an undefined concept, that has gained some traction. Fortunately from all reading I have done so far as part of this module I can formulate some of hypothesis for mechanisms behind ‘team work’.

The reasons for group of individuals working as part of a team can be explained using social psychology terms like goal theory, social facilitation and emotions. Even homeostatic theory could arguably be involved as humans can have a daily optimum level of contact or communication with others that they wish to fulfill. So, the next time you are asked at an interview or performance evaluation about what you understand by team work you can say that ‘team work is a complex social phenomenon in which individuals co-operate during activities in order to achieve certain goals, as well as fulfil a certain required level of some personal need, such as to communicate with others. Also, team work is product of social facilitation as it often causes individuals to become more involved and emotional about an activity because they are in the presence of others.’

Returning to why this is relevant for understanding groups, I had initially wanted to look at group behaviour and how it affects outputs. It now appears that fundamentals from sociology and psychology of human behaviour are base of most of the behaviours involved in groups. Applying abstract labels such as team-work can be a useful term to categorise the behaviour of a group working as a team, but looking at fundamentals is essential to understand actions of individuals working as part of a group.

A often cited experiment for understanding group behaviour, especially in relation to prejudice and conflict resolution is the

Robbers’ Cave’s experiment. This involved two groups, each of which were allowed to form a group identity and spend time engaged in some cooperative activities within their group. Later, both groups were entered to directly compete for prizes. Conflicts then quickly developed between the groups after losing rounds of the competition. Conflict resolution, and a reduction in intra and inter group prejudices was achieved by designing co-operative activities where the goals could only be achieved through co-operation of both groups.

I hope you enjoyed the blog posts, the final written report will contain the best of the blog posts plus some other ideas, and the what conclusions I have came to when comparing fundamental information about groups offline to online groups.

My previous posts gave an overview of the books that I was reading every week. After having read a number of books, that contain different viewpoints, I now have a more critical view on the subject of privacy.

The last few weeks I have focused my reading on certain textbooks from both Sociology and Psychology, but also on some books regarding privacy specifically (I discussed the second option with our lecturer and have taken his approval).

As far as Sociology is concerned, I read certain chapters from “Sociology” textbook by Giddens, that refer to social networks, as well as “The Power of Identity” by Castells. It was of great interest to my research finding out the differences between social networks and groups. “Thinking Sociologically” by Bauman helped me understand their differences more in depth, as the author describes in detail the way social groups are formed and behave towards other groups.

The “Power of Identity” along with a book entitled “The Invasion of Privacy”, written in the ’70s, helped me both to understand the relationship between people’s privacy and the State and the steps that the State has or hasn’t (??) taken towards protection of privacy from the ’70s till today.

As far as Psychology is concerned, I continued reading the “Social Psychology” textbook, which helped me focus more on the Self, his characteristics and the way the self regulates people’s behaviour. A book entitled “Between Public and Private – The Lost Boundaries of the Self”, helped me get a grip on further concepts that deal with the self and privacy, such as intimacy. Reading another textbook entitled “Applied Social Psychology” helped me understand the importance of material possesions in exerting control over other people and showing a social status.

Another book that appeared to be valuable to my study was “Privacy” by Young, which focused on several concepts that are related to privacy, such as anonymity, solitude, loneliness and confidentiality.

Finally, I have begun to focus my research on comparing the two disciplines and their relation to the concept of privacy. Psychologists place privacy at a micro scale, they consider it a problem of each individual, whereas sociologists locate it at a macro scale and regard privacy as a social issue. Which one is right and which one is wrong? Or are they both correct? More on this matter, in my final report…

No discourse on social theory of social groups would be complete without mentioning Mark Granovetter who did some fascinating network analysis and published his findings displaying the presence of weak ties, structural holes in organisations. Structural holes in particular explain how someone can become an unelected leader of a group if they hold a position in which they are the main conduit for which information can flow between separate parts of groups or between groups.

I have been reading ‘Theories of Communication Networks’, Noshir Contractor and Peter Monge (2003) a more complex book that references fundamentals from sociology, psychology, maths and computer science, that describes and help the reader understand complex communication networks involving large groups of people. It has become more and more apparent during my reading that it is increasingly difficult to look at a subject from just two disciplines, in my case, sociology and psychology. Some fundamentals from other subjects like maths, computer science, or philosophy are necessary so as not to have a one sided, or in this case two dimensional, view, thus highlighting the multi-disciplinary nature of web science topics. For the IDR though I have found ample material in ‘Theories of Communication Networks’ from sociology and psychology to describe groups and the communication mechanisms within them:

There are 2 branches of theories as to how groups internal behaviour can be modelled. These are:

• homophily theories – where individuals select others to communicate with who are similar to themselves.
• contagion theories – are based on the assumption that exposure to networks (groups) increase the likelihood that individuals are influenced by others and will then develop beliefs, attitudes and assumptions similar to those of others in their network.

These two theories are very useful for describing how groups form, and how individuals in groups are influenced.

Crowd psychology is one of the subclasses of social psychology, and social science books are interested in this aspect of psychology as it concerns how sudden and large scale social changers can be brought about because of large groups of people. There are a lot of interesting theories put forward over the past century about how large groups of people (crowds) behave,  by psychologists such as those by Carl Jung who coined the term ‘Collective Unconscious” that described a shared, universal psychic system identical in all individuals. Many people since Jung then have expanded this concept, such as blogger and researcher Kevin Kelly, who describes many Internet groups starting to exhibit a ‘Hive mind’. Sigmund Freud also has a theory known as his ‘Crowd behaviour theory’ that describes that people who are in a crowd act differently towards people than those who are thinking individually.

One of the most interesting and often challenged theory of modern day sociology is the theory of cognitive limit for the maximum number of people in a person can have a inter-personal relationship. In 1992, Dunbar published a theory that the neocortex size of the brain was a constraint on group size in primates. Dunbar predicted that human cognitive limit for relationships was 150 based on the size of the human neocortex. This is known as the Dunbar Number and is now widely referenced and cited, despite how Dunbar based his observations on primates other than humans along with information about human network sizes in less developed countries. Dunbar’s methodology appears to have observed that tribal village sizes, military units, company sizes average around 150. In light of this perhaps humans have hard wired limits in their brains, limiting the number of individuals they can have interpersonal relationships with – and similarly the number of groups they can participate actively in. Thus even the most highly social individuals, or those with strong psychological desires such as goal theories or homeostatic drives to participate in groups, will only be able to network effectively with fixed amount of people. Thus social and psychological desires for group participation come up against physical hard limits if Dunbar’s Number theory based on neocortex size is correct. It shows how social research on primate groups, along with some statistical and network analysis, can lead to interesting extrapolations of the limitations of human mind, and the limitations of relationships within a social group.

Personal Space

(Source: “The Environment and Social Behavior: Privacy, Personal Space, Territory, Crowding by I. Altman)

Personal Space refers to the distance that we maintain from other people, in order to feel secure and not threatened. It ensures that we are reaching a satisfactory level of privacy. A definition given by Goffman describes it as “the space surrounding an individual where within which an entering other causes the individual to feel encroaced upon, leading him to show displeasure and sometimes to withdraw.” Basic attributes of personal space are the following:

a. It is an ‘invisible’ boundary between ourself and other people.

b. It is carried everywhere a person goes.

c. In different situations the boundary of personal space is different, so the process of regulating it is a dynamic one.

d. If someone crosses the boundary of our personal space, we often feel threatened and stressed.

Edward Hall, an anthropologist, proposed the theory of proxemics, a theory that refers to the way people use space, in terms of communicating with others. He proposed 4 different spatial zones:

Intimate distance (0-6 inches – close phase, 6-18 inches – far phase);  “wrestling, comforting and protecting” distance

Personal distance (1.5-4 feet); intimate relationships

Social distance (4-12 feet); business and general social contact occur

Public distance (12-25 feet); formal occasions or public speaches

Furthermore, Hall observed that there are cultural differences in the use of space for communicating. He examined how different cultures treat personal space.

Personal space does exist online, but with a different form; people have their own virtual personal space, where they want to be able to maintain a certain distance from others, but at the same time interact with them. They log on to social networking sites to communicate with their friends, maintain their personal blogs or web sites etc. However Hall’s theory does not exist online, as there is no physical contact among people online.

Us and Them

(Source: “Thinking Sociologically” by Z. Bauman)

This chapter begins with an extremely interesting comparison between the number of people who influence our lives and the way we live and the people we actually know. There are uncountable multitudes that influence directly the way we live and we do not notice them, but there are also multitudes that put constraints to the way we live (e.g. pollution). If we now compare the number of people we know with these multitudes, we will realise that the difference is huge and that the people we know are very few.

The author separates people from his social intercourse into 3 groups:

a. People that we meet quite often and we have an intimate relationship with.

b. People that we meet on occasion (e.g. we meet our professors in the classroom for a lecture). The relationships we maintain with these people are called functional, as meeting these people serves a specific purpose of an activity. We are not interested in learning more things about these people, outside the function that they perform in our lives and we expect from them to do the same (e.g. we do not ask about the hobbies of our doctor). If they did actually ask more about ourselves, we would consider this as an intrusion of our privacy, says the author. It is a case of breaching an unwritten rule about the terms of our relationship, which is only an exchange of a particular service.

c. People that we hardly meet at all. We know their existence, but as they are not a direct part of our every day lives we do not pay particular attention to them.

As far as the second case is concerned (people we meet on occasion), I would add that this is not always how the things are. People do not always consider that being asked more personal questions is an intrusion of their privacy. For instance, if a person goes to the doctor for his annual checkup and the doctor asks him something personal (e.g. How’s your family doing?) it may not be considered by the patient that his privacy was breached. Instead he could go on and answer the question and perhaps make the same question to the doctor. This discussion may start, because people are interested into one another, or simply it may be a way to break the ice. And definitely the way people feel about being asked questions from people the meet on occasion, is affected by their cultural background (as Hall previously pointed out).

This post builds on what was discovered in last blog, and will be last using material from Social Psychology 5^th edition, S. Brehm. It was a worthy texbook that contained plenty of background theory on groups but I have exhausted all material relevant to my review. I would like to thank Cathy Pope for taking the time to comment on my posts as it helped me perceive my reading and work from another point of view, and refocused me to task at hand. Reading the comments on others work helped me understand the nature of the IDR assignment, and its starting to make a lot more sense.

This is a longer post than usual as I wont be blogging over next week. If you only have time for quick read, you can skip right on down to the end to a nice paragraph titled “summary and conclusions” which sums up the blog posting and has some evaluation. For all others with time and some interest you will gain more by reading the whole blog posting.

On to main part of my reading for this week:

Joining a group and group development: Newcomers usually go through a period of assimilation and model their behaviour on established members, while the group accommodates the newcomer. Bruce Tuckman (1965, 1977) proposed five stages of group development:

1. Forming – group members orient themselves towards the group.

2. Storming – members try to influence the group according to their needs.

3. Norming – members try to reconcile the conflicts produced by storming.

4. Performing – members perform and maximise group’s performance

5. Adjourning – members disengage from the group.

Other theories of group development do exist however. Connie Gersick (1988, 1994) observed that groups tend to operate in series of starts and stops rather than through uniform stages. Perhaps online groups could help provide primary research material to revisit group development theories as the cost of recording group activities and developments is lower than in offline groups, and theories of Tuckman or Gersick could be given more authority or challenged.

According to Forsyth 1990, all groups can be described in terms of three components: roles, norms and cohesiveness. Robert Bales, 1958 proposed two fundamental roles that have yet to be disproved. An instrumental role is one that helps a group achieve its tasks, and an expressive role gives emotional support and keeps moral high. Roles can be formal or informal and the same person can fill each role, however roles that are ambiguous or cause conflict can lead to stress and loss of productivity.

In online groups there are often a number of different formal roles, that could be those of users, administrators and moderators. Although the title of each may imply a different role, keeping Roberts Bales idea of fundamental roles in mind it can be argued that membership doesn’t define the role. Moderators, administrators or users can each perform instrumental or expressive roles, or a combination of the two, within a group. (My own social categorisation here is open to comments – perhaps others see different roles in online groups other than my simple ‘mods, admins and users’, if you do have a different view please leave a comment at end.)

Norms establish rules and code of conduct group members should conform to. Rules can be informal or formal.

Cohesiveness refers to the forces on a group that push its members closer together. They can be internal such as group pride, number and intensity of interaction or external such as an unusual environment or threats from other groups. Cohesiveness and group performance are causally related and either can influence the other. Positive norms can improve cohesiveness and lead to increased group performance, however negative norms coupled with high cohesiveness can lead to decreased group performance. Both offline and online groups should strive to promote positive norms and improved cohesiveness if better group performance is to be realised.

In prior blog postings it was noted that a group was two or more persons perceived as related because of their interactions over time, membership within a social category or a shared fate. Using that definition, we know that humans perceive and sort objects in the world around them into groups. The process of people sorting each other into groups is known as social categorization. People often use their perceived groupings to make inferences about all group members. This is one of the formative causes for stereotyping. People tend to overestimate the differences between groups and underestimated the differences within groups.

The groups that a person identifies with are called ingroups, and a group outside of these are called outgroups. The consequence of perceiving the world as “us” and “them” leads to the phenomenon of the outgroup homogeneity effect. This effect describes how perceivers assume greater similarity between members of outgroups than between members their own groups, to the extent that members of outgroups are perceived as homogenous. One of the reasons for this is that people do not often notice subtle differences in outgroups as there is little contact with them. The media plays a big role in how we categorize social groups and people learn stereotypes through group norms, role models and their peers.

Culture can play a part in ingroup – outgroup distinctions. People from collectivist cultures often perceive ingroup homogeneity more strongly than those from individualistic cultures. Online groups are not limited by geographical boundaries and can have large numbers of members from both collectivist cultures and individual. An open question could ask how this situation affects group dynamics where some group members perceive homogeneity and others value the differences? It may be the case that endurance of online groups with members of different cultures depends heavily on conformity and rules, as otherwise different perceptions would affect cohesion and group performance adversely.

Summary and conclusions

I particularly liked the terminology of ingroups and outgroups and the definitions from the book I read last week. It put into words things myself and probably others perceive and know but never give it a name. If you have ever read or seen, Lord of the Flies or even the popular American series ‘Lost’, or at very least supported a football club, you will be familiar with the idea of “us” and “them”. Now you know it is about ingroups and outgroups, the reasons behind this categorisation, and that probably everyone makes social categorisations everyday.

This week I took the initiative to start reading a book that is not a textbook and is written by Irwin Altman, a social psychologist in the 70s. The book is called “The Environment and Social Behavior: Privacy, Personal Space, Territory, Crowding”.

In the first chapters of the book, Altman focuses on privacy. Below are some of the main points that he makes:

1. Privacy is an interpersonal boundary-control process, which paces and regulates interaction with others.

2. Privacy can be divided into desired and achieved privacy. Desired privacy refers to the ideal level of interaction with others; how much interaction we desire at a specific moment. Achieved privacy refers to the actual degree of contact that we achieve with others. If achieved privacy is less or more than the desired one a state of imbalance exists; otherwise if the two are equal to one another then an optimum state of privacy exists.

3. As a result of the above one may realise that privacy is an optimising process; the optimum state of privacy is the ideal.

4. Privacy is also a dialectic process. As Altman states “privacy is an interplay of opposing forces – that is, different balances of opening and closing the self to others.” In other words, desired privacy is something relative; sometimes we want to be in the company of others, but other times we want to be left alone.

5. Privacy is an input and output process. Regulating privacy takes place by looking at what comes in and what goes out while interacting with others.

6. Privacy may refer to a variety of social units (individuals, groups of people, families, nations etc.) and their interactions between them.

7. Finally, it is a dynamic process. Privacy boundaries may change over time and in order to analyse privacy it needs to be under continuous observation.

Later on, the author refers to the mechanisms that people use, in order to implement desired levels of privacy. These mechanisms include verbal behaviour (e.g. “keep out!”), nonverbal use of the body, environmental behaviours (e.g. personal space, territory, clothing for approachability) and culturally defined norms and practices (different cultures may have different customs to regulate between public and private).

I would like to point out that things have changed significantly since the ’70s the time when this book was written. The evolution of technology and the birth of the Web have provoked new privacy concerns, which are much more complex than the ones that existed in the ’70s. Apart from our lives our offline, our lives continue online; in the online world the situation regarding privacy is very different than in the offline world. Online there is no physical contact between people and anyone can gain access over someone else’s information. As a result, making use of the above mentioned mechanisms is rather difficult. Apart from that, private information can be available online and stored indefinitely and can be accessed by people at any moment, so none of these mechanisms can be applied in this case.