Sarah E. Igo. The Known Citizen

Few contemporary topics are as white hot as the fate of privacy. Scarcely a day passes without news of purloined data, menacing algorithms, and personal scandals gone viral. It is hard not to feel that access to information about us is palpably different now. Our lives are increasingly connected, tracked, and observed, leaving vanishingly little of what we do to go unrecorded. This is both a blessing and a curse. One need only look to Facebook to see the paradox. With two billion active users, the global network is both a convenient social hub and a rapacious surveillance machine. As distinctions between private and public, offline and digital life, and consensual and compulsory sharing dissolve, the concept of privacy is more confusing than ever. Is privacy dead, or is it a basic human value in need of resuscitation? In The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America, Sarah E. Igo brilliantly interrogates the long history of privacy’s much-heralded demise and its shape-shifting meaning in the modern United States. Amid a veritable sea of writing on the subject, Igo’s ambitious study sails beyond philosophical problems of definition and technological foreboding. Beginning with Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis’s canonic 1890 Harvard Law Review article “The Right to Privacy,” she explores the evolution of privacy and its malleability across a wide range of legal, ethical, and cultural flash points throughout the twentieth century. Privacy, in her account, is neither a transcendent right nor a zero-sum concept in need of better parsing. Rather, it is a kind of language—“privacy talk,” in her words—that Americans adopted to debate the anxieties of mass society, from anonymity and alienation to manipulation and overexposure.

Demise · Human rights · Information privacy · Internet privacy · Political science · Right to privacy · Sociology · The Right to Privacy · Chinese history and philosophy · Computer Science · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law