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New Media Environments and Their Threats

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Situational Privacy and Self-Disclosure

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Abstract

This chapter discusses new media environments and the ways in which they have caused new threats for individuals’ privacy. Several horizontal and vertical dynamics that may impede or violate people’s privacy when communicating in novel networked environments are identified. On the horizontal level, these include the increased risks of information dissemination to unwanted audiences and the convergence of formerly distinct social spheres. On the vertical level, these refer to the commodification of information and its evocation of data collection and surveillance practices.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Scholars have discussed similar terms as affordances of social media (e.g., Boyd, 2011; Evans, Pearce, Vitak, & Treem, 2016; Treem & Leonardi, 2012). They thereby emphasize a relational view on how people use social media. Affordances represents subjective action possibilities related to particular features of an object or artifact. There is an important difference between defining something as a property of digital information or as an affordance of social media. For example, persistence can be regarded as a mere characteristic of an object. If we say that something is persistent, we mean that it lasts for a long time (e.g., if I am stating that information is persistent, I am referring to the long-lasting nature of digital bits). Persistence as an affordance of social media, in contrast, refers to the reviewability of information as an emerging social practice connected to the long-lasting nature of information transformed into digital bits. For now, I only use the following terms to describe the characteristics of digital information and not the action possibilities they suggest to individual users. However, I will come back to affordances in Sect. 12.3.

  2. 2.

    In the context of privacy research, several scholars have proposed a differentiation between those two levels (e.g., Masur, Teutsch, & Dienlin, 2018; Raynes-Goldie, 2010; Schwartz, 1968). I will discuss this differentiation more thoroughly in Sect. 6.2.1.

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  1. Universität Hohenheim, Stuttgart, Germany

    Philipp K. Masur

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Masur, P.K. (2019). New Media Environments and Their Threats. In: Situational Privacy and Self-Disclosure. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78884-5_2

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