Understanding the social in a digital age

Datafication, algorithms, social media and their various assemblages enable massive connective processes, enriching personal interaction and amplifying the scope and scale of public networks. At the same time, surveillance capitalists and the social quantification sector are committed to monetizing every aspect of human communication, all of which threaten ideal social qualities, such as togetherness and connection. This Special Issue brings together a range of voices and provocations around ‘the social’, all of which aim to critically interrogate mediated human connection and their contingent socialities. Conventional methods may no longer be adequate, and we must rethink not only the fabric of the social but the very tools we use to make sense of our changing social formations. This Special Issue raises shared concerns with what the social means today, unpicking and rethinking the seams between digitization and social life that characterize today’s digital age

In/Visible Bodies. On patients and privacy in a networked world

In the networked world, privacy and visibility become entangled in new and unexpected ways. This article uses the concept of networked visibility to explore the entanglement of technology and the visibility of patient bodies. Based\ud on semi-structured interviews with patients active in social media, this paper describes how multiple patient bodies are produced in the negotiations between the need for privacy and the need for social interaction. Information technology is actively involved in these negotiations: patients use technology to make their bodies both visible and invisible. At the same time technology collects data on these patients, which can be used for undesired commercial and surveillance\ud purposes. The notion of visibility by design may infuse design efforts that enable online privacy, supporting patients in the multiple ways they want to be visible and invisible online

Tumult and turmoil : privacy in an ambient world

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) and ubiquitous computing allow us to consider a future where computation is embedded into our daily social lives. This vision raises its own important questions. Our own interest in privacy predates this impending vision, but nonetheless holds a great deal of relevance there. As a result, we have recently conducted a wide reaching study of people’s attitudes to potential AmI scenarios with a view to eliciting their privacy concerns. The approach and findings will be discussed

PRIMA — Privacy research through the perspective of a multidisciplinary mash up

Based on a summary description of privacy protection research within three fields of inquiry, viz. social sciences, legal science, and computer and systems sciences, we discuss multidisciplinary approaches with regard to the difficulties and the risks that they entail as well as their possible advantages. The latter include the identification of relevant perspectives of privacy, increased expressiveness in the formulation of research goals, opportunities for improved research methods, and a boost in the utility of invested research efforts

Blogging: self presentation and privacy

Blogs are permeating most niches of social life, and addressing a wide range of topics from scholarly and political issues1 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

Investigating privacy in an ambient world

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) and ubiquitous computing allow us to consider a future where computation is embedded into our daily social lives. This vision raises its own important questions and augments the need to understand how people will achieve and maintain privacy. As a result, we have recently conducted a wide reaching study of people’s attitudes to potential AmI scenarios with a view to eliciting their privacy concerns. The focus of this paper will be on the method used and preliminary findings will be discussed

Human-agent collectives

We live in a world where a host of computer systems, distributed throughout our physical and information environments, are increasingly implicated in our everyday actions. Computer technologies impact all aspects of our lives and our relationship with the digital has fundamentally altered as computers have moved out of the workplace and away from the desktop. Networked computers, tablets, phones and personal devices are now commonplace, as are an increasingly diverse set of digital devices built into the world around us. Data and information is generated at unprecedented speeds and volumes from an increasingly diverse range of sources. It is then combined in unforeseen ways, limited only by human imagination. People’s activities and collaborations are becoming ever more dependent upon and intertwined with this ubiquitous information substrate. As these trends continue apace, it is becoming apparent that many endeavours involve the symbiotic interleaving of humans and computers. Moreover, the emergence of these close-knit partnerships is inducing profound change. Rather than issuing instructions to passive machines that wait until they are asked before doing anything, we will work in tandem with highly inter-connected computational components that act autonomously and intelligently (aka agents). As a consequence, greater attention needs to be given to the balance of control between people and machines. In many situations, humans will be in charge and agents will predominantly act in a supporting role. In other cases, however, the agents will be in control and humans will play the supporting role. We term this emerging class of systems human-agent collectives (HACs) to reflect the close partnership and the flexible social interactions between the humans and the computers. As well as exhibiting increased autonomy, such systems will be inherently open and social. This means the participants will need to continually and flexibly establish and manage a range of social relationships. Thus, depending on the task at hand, different constellations of people, resources, and information will need to come together, operate in a coordinated fashion, and then disband. The openness and presence of many distinct stakeholders means participation will be motivated by a broad range of incentives rather than diktat. This article outlines the key research challenges involved in developing a comprehensive understanding of HACs. To illuminate this agenda, a nascent application in the domain of disaster response is presented

Unpacking Privacy Paradox: A Dual Process Theory Approach

Prior studies showed that some users tend to act against their stated privacy concerns (a phenomenon commonly known as privacy paradox). In this study, we adopt the dual process theory as our theoretical basis to account for conscious and unconscious modes of individual decision making processes to examine privacy paradox in order to gain an understanding of the reasons which cause inconsistency between privacy concern and information disclosure. We also posit that privacy paradox can occur due to the conscious mode (affected by bounded rationality) as well as unconscious biases

Networked Privacy Beyond the Individual: Four Perspectives to ‘Sharing’

Synthesizing prior work, this paper provides conceptual grounding for understanding the dialectic of challenges and opportunities that social network sites present to social life. With the help of the framework of interpersonal boundary regulation, this paper casts privacy as something people do, together, instead of depicting it as a characteristic or a possession. I illustrate interpersonal aspects of networked privacy by outlining four perspectives to ‘sharing’. These perspectives call for a rethink of networked privacy beyond an individual’s online endeavors