Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Personal privacy is by most accounts under unprecedented threat; indeed, it has already suffered serious setbacks. The social context, of course, is the so-called “information age,” the rapid, technology-driven transition to a post-industrial world of instant, ubiquitous data. As computerisation and “informatisation” proceed relentlessly, and time-honoured boundaries between the private and the public collapse, personal information becomes increasingly vulnerable, its sanctity disputed. Thus privacy is stationed as a prime site of the normative crisis of the information society. In reaction, alongside sporadic, inadequate political and technical solutions, there has emerged a growing body of profound conceptual work devoted to the defence of privacy. Anchored in a range of disciplines, including philosophy, law, sociology, and communications, and often helpfully crossing disciplinary lines, this corpus is already doing much both to clarify the issues at hand and to point to potential answers. For example, in sociology the work of David Lyon has considerable explanatory power for the analysis of the social impact of information technology. In philosophy and law, Helen Nissenbaum has not only explicated the nature of post-industrial privacy, but endorsed, in a way Kant might not have approved, obfuscation as an ethical response to dubious demands for personal data. Privacy fundamentalism 2.0 is the name for a new theory of privacy that builds upon the work of such contemporary pioneers. It also seeks to ground the human right to privacy more deeply, by reappropriating the neglected philosophical tradition of British idealism associated with thinkers such as T.H. Green, Bernard Bosanquet, and Edward Caird. And it will do so in full light of the world-historical socio-technical transformation of web 2.0 and the unfolding global network society.