Eric Gordon at Art Interactive
Eric Gordon, Assistant Professor at Emerson College (and my prof) spoke this evening at Art Interactive in Cambridge, MA. The title of his talk (as seen above) was “The Digital Possessive: Private Spaces in Public Space”. A bit from the event blurb:
I explore the practical methods through which users create, manage, and understand the nature of personal data within their private spaces, arguing that the emergent private sphere is both productive and reflective of the economic and social imperatives of the new web.
(Please excuse my crude translation of the summary to follow, but I’ll give it a shot anyways. Eric or others can correct me if I’m totally off the mark, which is always entirely possible.)
Eric talked about a new concept of “public space” within networks. He says that public space is being constructed within a privatization of those spaces. There’s a shift going on from an ownership culture to a possessive culture.
In referencing Mark Weiser’s idea that “good tools enhance invisibility”, Eric explained that tools like del.icio.us are designed to do just that. Instead, they give users access to ordering methods. He says, what becomes invisible is the thing that the tools order, hence the emergence of The Digital Possessive.
Eric found Martin Heidegger’s concept of the “Standing-Reserve” useful in finding meaning in what is going on here, that the technology is being created to order the world around us.
As a result, our sense of privacy is changing. Eric explained that privacy is increasingly defined by the ability to control the public. He concluded by saying, “Privacy once was the freedom from others’ gaze and now freedom means the ability to manage and order that gaze.”
(For more, I refer you to Eric’s “working draft of the introduction to the last chapter” of his book. He does a much better job talking about his ideas than I do.)
