post-privacy age

Debates about privacy in media environments, particularly the online world, burn as strongly as they ever have. 

Some even contend that we are already in a post-privacy age, with the development of professional and personal interactions and relations through social media and the melding of the two spheres, manifest, for example, in forms of immaterial labour. 

Concerns are expressed about surveillance, the treatment of protest by the State, and abandonment of respect for privacy by commercial organisations.  Yet, high profile dissenting organisations and analysts, such as Wikileaks, IndyMedia and The Invisible Committee, for example – provide evidence of a more complex, contested environment. 

Wikileaks’s maxim “privacy for individuals and transparency for institutions” is suggestive of a new paradigm of what must be private, and what will be public.