privacy and self disclosure

No comments on your blogs today. I'm on my soapbox.

The third edition of the text for this class addressed issues of privacy and self disclosure, but the fourth edition has much more in depth coverage. This additional coverage is one reason why it's worth purchasing the fourth edition. With some textbooks, the authors make just minor changes between editions. For this text, there were major revisions.

Although I don't agree with all aspects of Petronio's communication privacy model, I do like the attention the model draws to the notion of privacy (so a move away from complete openness being the best way to communicate) and the idea of negotiating those privacy boundaries. So the boundaries aren't fixed, but can be altered through communication in relationships with others. One weaknesses of the model is that power isn't addressed very well. For example, in families, parents have more power to negotiate privacy boundaries than children. Similarly, in organizations, supervisors have more power to set privacy boundaries than employees. For example, research my colleagues and I conducted on workplace surveillance found that organizations exert a great deal of power in defining the reasons for surveillance.

A story on NPR this morning on email surveillance got me thinking about privacy boundaries. The NPR host interviewed a woman whose company searches through the email of organizations' email (at their request) for legal reasons. We're talking about thousands, 10s of thousands, and millions of email messages. The bottom line: email never goes away and it is public. So all the negotiation employees may try out in managing privacy boundaries in the workplace will face the cold reality of email message longevity and accessibility.

As you read through the chapters, consider the ways in which the concepts and theories apply--or don't--to your interpersonal communication experiences. If a concept or theory doesn't seem to fit, that doesn't mean it's wrong, only that it may need modification or a different concept or theory may be a better fit.

--Professor Cyborg