The “digital village” revisited,or the re-ruralization of the public and private spheres in contemporary digitality

Abstract

This article aims to make a theoretical contribution to clarify the societal impact of the reorganization of public and private in the digital age. Drawing on the spatial-sociological approach of German sociologist HP Bahrdt, the discussion is guided by the thesis that the specific dynamics of privacy risk attributed to the digital revolution pre-date the digitized age, specifically in rural environments. The analogy between rurality and digitality is used to illustrate why the increasing blurring of public and private through transparency potentials—along with the accompanying convergence of social contacts (characteristic of both rural and digital space)—threatens not only individual privacy but also democratization by violating forms of individual freedom that are constitutive of a critical public realm. Therefore, this article serves as a call to understand digital privacy protection as one of the pressing challenges of our time.

Keywords

Autonomy digital privacy literacy digitization privacy management privacy risks private sphere public sphere rurality spatial sociology transparency

A village is a hive of glass where nothing unobserved can pass.

Charles H. Spurgeon (1834–1892)

This article aims to advance theoretical understandings of the blurring, if not dissolution, of the boundaries between the public and private spheres in the contemporary conditio digitalis (Zurawski, 2019), mindful of the societal implications of an increasingly “amalgamated public privacy” (Debatin, n.d.: para. 4). As digital data collection and processing technologies have advanced, so have the voices in academic and public discourse proclaiming “the end of privacy” (Whitaker, 1999). Anthropologically and historically, it is debatable whether privacy has ever objectively existed (Keulen and Kroeze, 2018; Van der Geest, 2018) or whether it rather represents a “fetishism” of capitalism, as Fuchs (2011) argues, an expression of neoliberal individualism, or a normative utopia. Consequently, it is not found—or only emerges in a modified form—in communities oriented toward collective values (e.g. Fullenwieder and Molnar, 2018; Rennie et al., 2018). However, as conceptually elusive as the two theorems of the public and the private may be, their analytical and theoretical distinction has made it possible to identify them as a prerequisite for the emergence of Western modernity, thereby elucidating their necessity for both the individual and society (Habermas, 1991).

According to previous research based on the Western liberal conception of privacy, the evolution of the public/private dichotomy in the digital age is characterized by two dynamics. On one hand, there is concern about the loss of privacy in an increasingly intimate society, as privacy is recognized in Western thought as a universal human need and right (Altman, 1975; Moore, 1984; Westin, 1967). Accordingly, the increasing digital penetration of people’s daily lives has always been accompanied by concerns that privacy—even individual intimacy—may be violated or eliminated as privacy in the public sphere continues to erode. Digital privacy literacy, which is typically defined as the ability of individuals to effectively protect themselves from social, economic, and institutional influences online (Masur, 2020), is seen as key to defending against privacy invasions and violations caused by the proliferation of digital technologies (Park, 2013; Trepte and Reinecke, 2011).

On the other hand, while it is perhaps self-evident that privacy operates primarily at the individual level, it is important to remember that privacy also has a crucial public dimension (Goold, 2010). In particular, the impact of new technologies on “our conventions of democratic governance” is one of the most pressing issues of our time (Papacharissi, 2010: 10): that is, the decline of the public sphere as a democratic norm due to the intrusion of the public into the private. While such a decline can be blamed on deliberately publicized privacy (e.g. Sennett, 1977), the call to protect and restore the public sphere in the digital world always implies the protection of private thoughts and experiences that are not intentionally shared (Stahl, 2016), given that “the public sphere must be understood as [a] constitutive corollary of the private sphere” (Debatin, n.d.: para. 1).

This article attempts to theoretically ground the debate on the entanglement of the public and private spheres in digitalization through a spatial-sociological comparison: that is, by drawing analogies between rurality and digitality with regard to privacy risks and privacy management. In this conceptual perspective, privacy is not negotiated at the individual level but in the context of its significance in constituting the (one might add, Western) democratic order. In this sense, the article also contributes to the broader debate on privacy and its protection at the socio-political level, even if this issue is, in the words of Mark Andrejevic, “anathema to the current climate of neoliberal individualism” (Troullinou, 2017: 76). The thesis underlying the article argues that we are witnessing a kind of re-ruralization of the public and private spheres through the digital penetration of our daily lives. It follows that privacy challenges in the digitally mediatized world (Couldry and Hepp, 2017) have a kind of functional equivalent in (pre-)digitized human history. Some privacy risks in the digitized era, such as certain types of information flows in networked environments, thus appear less novel than is commonly assumed (e.g. Masur, 2019).

Previous studies have already analogized privacy in the countryside to that in the digital world (e.g. Papacharissi and Gibson, 2011; Van der Geest, 2018). However, these studies have either neglected to theorize the comparison or dismissed it entirely. Therefore, in what follows, this article will first prepare the theoretical ground from which the thesis of the re-ruralization of the public–private binary has emerged. Drawing on German sociologist Hans Paul Bahrdt (1918–1994), the notion of rurality will be defined, and then the specific risks to privacy and its management in rural space will be addressed. A subsequent section of the article follows the same steps for digital space. The last section will bring both perspectives together and summarize the theoretical reflections on the comparison of rurality and digitality in four theses to lay the groundwork for further empirical research.

Theorizing the public–private binary in a spatial context

If one follows Richard Sennett (1977), the public sphere was originally an exclusively metropolitan phenomenon. This article argues that contemporary research on privacy and the public sphere still takes this urban origin as its starting point; that is, both notions are conceptualized from an inherently metropolitan standpoint (see Papacharissi and Gibson, 2011; Véliz, 2019). Those who challenge or abandon this view must inevitably confront urbanity’s spatial-sociological counterpart, rurality.

The first step is to define what is meant by rurality. When we speak of the village today, does not an ideal-typically imagined, transfigured—perhaps even romanticized—conception of life in the countryside appear before our mind’s eye (Beetz, 2010; Bell, 2006)? Researchers have proposed a whole range of definitions and theories on the sociology of space (see, e.g. Cloke et al., 2006; Hillyard, 2007). From a communication studies perspective, German sociologist HP Bahrdt’s approach proves particularly fruitful for a theoretical comparison between rural and digital space, as it synthesizes communication theory and spatial public sphere theory (Breidenbach, 2020). In his seminal book Die moderne Großstadt (The Modern Metropolis), first published in 1961, Bahrdt introduces the categories of the public and the private, which denote two social and simultaneously spatial spheres into which urban life is polarized. For him, this polarity between public and private is the constitutive dividing line between urbanity and rurality (Vaiou and Kalandides, 2009):

A city is a settlement in which all life, including everyday life, tends toward polarization, that is, to take place either in the social aggregate state of publicness or in that of privacy. A public and a private sphere are formed in close interrelation without losing the polarity between them. (Bahrdt, 1998: 83)

In contrast to the influential work of sociologist Georg Simmel (1971 [1907]), who emphasizes a specifically urban mentality, Bahrdt thus examines the social behavior of urban dwellers, which varies according to the spatial sphere. For him, the urban public sphere is “a particular feature of communication” (Breidenbach, 2020: 90). Social behavior is shaped by the influences and experiences of the urban public sphere, differing in this respect from non-urban settlements (Rosol and Vogelpohl, 2019: 369). Therefore, it is not the concrete location—that is, the mere spatial dimension as such—that is decisive in Bahrdt’s view, but the specific way in which people living together relate to each other socially.

To describe behavior in the public sphere, Bahrdt resorts to the “metaphor” of the market (Häußermann and Siebel, 2004: 56), using the polarity of public (market) and private (intimacy of the home) as a central characteristic of urbanity. According to the sociologist, the partial freedom of the exchangers on the market results in “a partial arbitrariness of contact among all those who appear as buyers or sellers” (Bahrdt, 1998: 83). Drawing on Max Weber (1978 [1922]), who describes the market in the modern city as “the most impersonal form of practical life into which humans can enter with one another” (p. 636), Bahrdt (1998) views the central feature of the market as incomplete integration, that is, “an openness of the social intentionality of individuals, who are free to decide with whom, in what way, and for how long they make contact in order to trade” (p. 86). Specifically, this means that “people enter and withdraw from the market [. . .] without relinquishing other structural attachments” (Bender, 1988: 263). Weber (1978 [1922]) conceives of markets as loci without “obligations of brotherliness or reverence” where “none of [the] spontaneous human relations [. . .] are sustained by personal unions” (p. 636). Sennett (1977) argues a similar point in The Fall of the Public Man, suggesting that cities provide specific places where it is possible to exchange ideas with strangers according to predetermined rules.

In summary, Bahrdt’s approach is based on two factors that are conducive to the emergence of an urban public: on one hand, “the incomplete integration and open intentionality of social relationships” (Breidenbach, 2020: 92) that Bahrdt (1998) defines as “the negative precondition of the public sphere” (p. 86), making anonymity and individual lifestyles in urban space possible in the first instance; on the other hand, “the self-representation and stylization of behavior and communication” (Breidenbach, 2020: 92). Rural settlements neither know this duality of public and private spheres, their “normative stylization” (Bahrdt, 1998: 33), nor the open intentionality of social contacts—especially if one thinks of small-scale communities in particularly isolated, deserted, and remote areas (see, e.g. Norris, 2001), settlements with special topographical conditions (such as island, forest, and mountain locations), or village-like micro-states.

It follows that the weaker the polarity between the public and private spheres, the less pronounced the urban character of a settlement. In rurality, there are hardly any social contacts between individuals essentially unknown to each other, in the sense of one party not knowing exactly where the other is located. Bahrdt (1998) refers to a “closed system,” meaning a social order

in which practically all social relations are mediated by a dense, theoretically unbroken network of personal ties. Contacts with people in the wider social environment then present themselves as chains of interconnected ties that, on the one hand, determine the “how” [quotation marks added by the author] of the contact and, on the other hand, make the contact indirect. (p. 87)

In the countryside (or in secluded areas more generally), an individual does not enter the local store as a quasi-anonymous person. Instead, they are immediately known to others through their various roles: as X’s son, Y’s wife, or Z’s co-worker; as the schoolteacher or the village police officer (even when out of uniform); as a drunkard or a fool. When a stranger enters the store, they are recognized as such—and, if possible, instantly classified (e.g. as a tourist or an acquaintance or relative of another villager). Thus, rurality compromises “a strongly pronounced privacy and a possibility to retreat into the intimacy of the home” (Rosol and Vogelpohl, 2019: 369). More specifically, village life lacks anonymity: that is, the possibility to negate “some aspects of the legally identified and/or physically embodied persona” (Asenbaum, 2018: 459). However, anonymity, as a crucial feature of privacy, is a necessary means to afford identity creation (Asenbaum, 2018: 463) and thus serves as a prerequisite for complete individualization (Häußermann and Siebel, 2004: 57).

Notably, the absence of privacy has not only characterized localities in the pre-digitized age but also in the present day. As Carissa Véliz (2019) notes, “in rural areas, privacy challenges are much the same as they have been for hundreds of years, with some exceptions provided by technologies such as smartphone cameras and drones (which also affect cities)” (p. 23).

With his conceptual distinction, Bahrdt stands out from other theorists. In his spatial-sociological understanding, he neither makes normative claims about the public nor private sphere, as Habermas (1991) does in his work on the structural transformation of the public sphere. Indeed, Bahrdt describes his conceptualization in some respects as “unhistorical” and “unphilosophical” in comparison to Habermas, explaining that when he speaks of the market or political institutions at different levels, “it is always an initially phenomenological description and analysis of the possibilities of individuals’ social behavior under certain conditions” (Bahrdt, 1998: 31). Nor does he lapse into a simplistic conservatism by which the village is associated with the private sphere and the urban mainly with the public sphere, as suggested in Ferdinand Tönnies’s (1988 [1887]) social geography of Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society) (see Phillips, 1998: 132). The transition from village to city is as elusive in Bahrdt’s model as the boundary between public and private.

Generally speaking, urban sociology has been criticized for its one-sided search for a specific urban lifestyle (Beetz, 2010). However, Bahrdt’s concept of the polarity of public and private has the advantage of being flexible enough to apply to different spatial contexts. Even in cities, one can encounter a specific form of networked cohabitation—the famous “urban village” (Gans, 1962)—in which supposedly village-like behavioral practices are further cultivated in an urban milieu.

Privacy risks and management in rurality

Privacy invasions are not a recent phenomenon. People of different generations and cultures have grappled with the question of how to protect their privacy from the prying eyes of the public (Anthony et al., 2017). Moreover, privacy has always been associated with hierarchies—it has never been equally or fairly distributed across societies, communities, or even families. This article is not the place to detail the genesis of privacy as a concept (see instead Keulen and Kroeze, 2018; Van der Geest, 2018; Vincent, 2016) or to recount its myriad definitions and theorems, such as those of Alan F. Westin (1967) and Irwin Altman (1975, 1977), arguably the most cited theorists in the field of Western privacy studies (Margulis, 2011). Nor can the article address alternatives to the concept of privacy, such as obfuscation (Brunton and Nissenbaum, 2016), as its goal is not to answer the normative question of whether privacy in its Western manifestation is the panacea for social coexistence (see, e.g. Etzioni, 1999). Rather, it focuses on the social ramifications of the blurring of private and public spheres in Western societies as a result of the emergence and diffusion of digital technologies and the associated shift in power structures brought about by digitality.

Drawing on the work of communication scholar Manuel Wendelin (2020), this article assumes that privacy is threatened by increased “transparency potentials” (p. 22). Any form of behavior, action, or communication that is visible—in other words, transparent—to others potentially poses risks to an individual’s privacy (c.f., Weintraub, 1997). This conceptualization goes beyond classic and standard definitions that identify privacy as the ability to control the conditions under which personal information is shared with or used by the public (Newell, 2019: 6; Papacharissi and Gibson, 2011: 79). In addition, it does not impose any normative requirements on privacy or its protection (such as the landmark “right to be let alone,” as advocated by Warren and Brandeis (1890: 193); see also Moore, 2010; Moreham, 2006; Newell et al., 2019; Nissenbaum, 1997). Transparency potential is increased in two ways: by voluntarily making information available (self-disclosure) and by the involuntary collection, evaluation, and disclosure of information by third parties. Wendelin (2020) describes transparency as “observer-relative and gradual,” meaning that “facts can be more or less transparent—more visible to some than to others” (p. 27). At the governance level, transparency may create trust (e.g. when citizens gain insight into political processes). For the general public, however, an increased potential for transparency tends to be associated with a loss of privacy.

While Wendelin discusses transparency phenomena in the digitized world, the (almost) complete integration (in Bahrdt’s sense) in the countryside has always allowed for increased transparency potentials. For example, when a teenager is observed on a village street on a weekday morning, this action voluntarily, but also involuntarily, sends out information that can be collected, evaluated, and shared by other villagers. Not in school like all the other children in the village, they will probably be quickly exposed as a truant.

The increased transparency potential in the village thus results from extreme visibility based on the absence of incomplete integration and thus anonymity. Put differently, a villager is constantly sending out data, which (depending on the respective power constellations) offers what is called exploitation potential: data, in whatever form, must be meaningful and valuable to whoever exploits it at the very moment of visibility or at a later point in time (the data are then processed retrospectively). The exploitation potential increases as more is known about a person, a thing, or a situation: the more transparency, the less privacy, and the more exploitation potential.

Analogously, Wendelin (2020) identifies power imbalances as an integral feature of transparency phenomena, along with the properties of observer relativity and graduality. He draws on the political scholar Ann Florini (2007), who refers to transparency as “the degree to which information is available to outsiders that enables them to have informed voice in decisions and/or to assess the decisions made by insiders” (p. 5). Hence, privacy risks always include the danger that information will be misused by others or used against oneself (Masur, 2019: 1). In rural areas, the absence of incomplete integration fosters specific power imbalances and forms of coercion that structure the conditions of supposedly “free” interaction and exchange. These connections are determined by social norms and structures through “mediation by personal relations, like social or family ties” (Breidenbach, 2020: 91). This situation features the “low differentiation of experienced power spheres (parents, school, village public, police) and the interpretive sovereignty of older, established people in the village” (Brauer, 2019: 160). In the absence of distinct social spheres—as in urban space, the networked nature of rurality can be perceived as a convergence of different social contexts. When the truant teenager enters the local store, they are not just a customer but also a school student and X’s child.

The picture is further complicated by the potential reach, persistence, and content conversion of information flows in rural space. First, the village does not forget. Knowledge about other residents is stored in the “communicative memory” (Assmann, 2008) of its residents, to be retrieved or altered when needed and passed on between villagers, sometimes for generations. Oral traditions, including folk tales and stories, have been a critical feature of rural cultures for centuries (Marszałek, 2019). Second, control mechanisms may take effect through gossip and rumors. The truant, for instance, may have a hard time finding a job in the area after graduating from school. Everyone will remember that this individual never took work very seriously. Other villagers may blame the individual or their entire family, especially if unflattering information has been circulating about them (even though only half of it may be true).

The absence of incomplete integration limits agency and anonymity (Bahrdt, 1998), and it is not without reason that some speak of the countryside as an “anti-idyll” (Bell, 1997) or a “context of distress and terror” (Jeggle and Ilien, 1978: 38), in which people are cruelly confined. While incomplete integration of urban areas gives greater scope for anonymity and freedom, social control is always more restrictive in remote regions. There, the individual is likely to act and communicate more predictably (Breidenbach, 2020: 91). Such consequences of perceived or actual surveillance are described as “chilling effects” (i.e. processes of self-censorship) in the literature and are sometimes used as explanatory variables for lower crime rates and higher security in rural areas (Bell, 2006; Ceccato, 2016; Kaylen, 2011). However, it would be misleading to reduce privacy management in rural areas to forms of social adaptation alone; resilience effects can also be observed. As the German writer Juli Zeh (2021) aptly sets out in her famous village novel Über Menschen (About People): one does not learn to resolve contradictions in the countryside but to endure them—precisely because one cannot retreat into a bubble of like-minded people as in urbanity.

Privacy risks and management in digitality: a brief survey of relevant studies

There is a wealth of research on privacy in the digitized world (for a systematic literature review, see Svensson et al., 2016). This section summarizes the state of the field and highlights aspects relevant to the discussion included in the remainder of the article.

Privacy risks in the digital age are generally conceptualized starting from the sources that may threaten privacy. Philipp Masur et al. (2019) point out that privacy is threatened by intrusions from both individual and state or commercial actors—which the authors refer to as vertical privacy—and by interventions from civilians (i.e. the networked community), which they refer to as horizontal privacy (see also Masur, 2019). This distinction suggests a hierarchical notion of what online privacy needs to be protected from—that is, whether privacy is violated by one’s immediate environment (the horizontal, with whom one is at eye level) or by a higher regime (the vertical, which looms above). Similarly, but less hierarchical in appearance, Kate Raynes-Goldie (2010) distinguishes between social privacy on the Internet—for example, vis-a-vis one’s peer group—and institutional privacy, which relates to providers such as Google or Meta. Both concepts imply that a loss of privacy is accompanied by a loss of control over personal information; in other words, third parties can access, potentially exercise power over, and instrumentalize personal data for their ends. As Jacquelyn Burkell (2008) argues, “our digital shadows grow ever more complex, ever more revealing, and ever more interesting to those with a desire to know who we are, what we do, and what we think” (p. 3).

At the horizontal (or social) level, previous scholarship has identified three dynamics that increase the risk of online privacy breaches (Masur, 2019: 23–26; Masur et al., 2019: 345). First, the scalability of information, the unexpected and rapid spread of shared information online, results from five technical properties of digital communication: persistence, searchability, replicability, editability, and linkability. Second, the dissolution of boundaries between different domains of social life, known as context collapse (Binder et al., 2009; Vitak, 2012), refers to the challenge of contending “with groups of people who reflect different social contexts and have different expectations as to what’s appropriate” (boyd, 2010: 50). Third, as a consequence of the preceding dynamics, the dissolution of the public–private dichotomy emerges; that is, the increased blurring of the boundaries between public and private. Privacy invasions at the vertical (or institutional) level include both the commodification of digital traces by individual and majority corporatist actors—such as those from the tech industry (information capitalism)—and informational surveillance by state institutions (Goold, 2010; Greenwald, 2015; Sevignani, 2016; Zuboff, 2019).

While there are privacy laws and compliance regulations to protect private data (e.g. Solove, 2016), there is a tendency to provide technological solutions at the individual level. However, this shifts the burden of the problem to the end user, placing the onus of privacy protection on the individual (Troullinou, 2017: 75). Online privacy literacy—which can be described as the ability of individuals to effectively protect themselves from social, economic, or institutional influences—results from a triad of “factual privacy knowledge,” “privacy-related reflection ability,” and “privacy and data protection skills” (Masur, 2020: 260). Thus, in addition to knowledge about what threatens privacy in general, applying this knowledge to one’s actions and protecting privacy through specific strategies and techniques is required (see, e.g. Trepte et al., 2015). The latter include establishing anonymity or pseudonymity, limiting the visibility of posted content (e.g. to a specific group of people), sophisticated self-disclosure techniques, and deleting digital traces (see Bazarova and Choi, 2014; Marwick and boyd, 2014).

The “re-ruralization” of public and private spheres: four theses

This final section synthesizes the theoretical reflections on the binary of public and private in spatial and digital contexts into four theses. While simplifying the complexities of both digital and rural realities, the theoretical spatial-sociological comparison is intended to advance understanding of the blurring of the public and private spheres in Western societies. Theses 1 and 2 are concerned with the societal implications of the merging of these two spheres, while Theses 3 and 4 are based on conceptual considerations related to previous research on privacy in the digital age. The theses may also serve as a suggestion for a research program to test their empirical rigor.

Thesis 1: Some of the privacy risks we are witnessing in the digital age are less new from a spatial-sociological perspective than is commonly assumed. Digitality dissolves the polarity between public and private to the point of complete integration, as has been the case in rural spaces throughout history. Given that rural communities have always had to negotiate the boundaries between public and private, it can be argued that some of today’s privacy risks have a kind of (functional) equivalent in (pre-)digitized human history.

It is a truism that the Father State has always been interested in knowing what its citizens are doing (Goold, 2010; Keulen and Kroeze, 2018). Westin (1967), for example, formulated his theory of privacy in the 1960s in response to the increasing state surveillance of US society long before the emergence of the Internet. Urbanization as a cause of industrialization intensified demands for the surveillance of urban spaces in the late eighteenth century when the modern surveillance state was born. Population growth, mobility, and the dissolution of the individual into the mass were increasingly perceived as threats to both the individual and the rulers’ monopoly on violence (Newell et al., 2019; Vincent, 2016).

From the theoretical perspective of spatial sociology, however, it is novel to consider that the horizontal risks to privacy also have a pre-digital antecedent. More specifically, the so-called collapse of public and private spheres described in the literature regarding the digitized age (boyd, 2010; Marwick and boyd, 2014; Masur et al., 2019) as a consequence of the scalability of information and context convergence finds a counterpart in rurality. There, individuals have always held different roles, social contexts have converged consistently, and total memory (including gossip, rumors, tales, and lies) and social control have remained part of rural communication structures. Consequently, urbanity used to offer protection, serving as a refuge. Today’s pseudonymization and anonymization of one’s online profile used to be called rural exodus: go where no one knows you and where the risk of being recognized is lower.

Of course, rural social networks have always been much less complex than online social networks, which tend to be more diffuse, consisting of a larger number of weak, latent, and transient ties that are not directly linked to other social contacts. However, the comparison with the village makes it clear that even a far less complex fusion of public and private, such as has always existed in the countryside, and is now being brought about in a similar and even more sophisticated way through digitization, shakes the democratic foundations:

Thesis 2: The history of urbanization serves as a cautionary tale of what happens when the public and the private merge, inevitably leading to the decline of a critical public sphere. In the face of advancing digitalization, the protection of privacy—and, by extension, the promotion of privacy protection—is one of the most pressing tasks of our time.

Previous scholarship has highlighted the positive relationship between (the protection of) privacy and democracy (see, e.g. Goold, 2010; Nissenbaum, 2010; Papacharissi, 2010). Scholars concerned with the public sphere posit that an increasingly transparent society is “dysfunctional” and threatens the democratic order in Western societies (Wendelin, 2020: 34; see also Dahlgren, 2005; Held, 2006). In the words of political scientist Priscilla M. Regan (1995), privacy is important “because it helps to establish the boundaries for the exercise of power” (p. 225). Deliberative and liberal models of democracy point to citizens’ need for individuality, autonomy, deviance, and nonconformity, all of which are challenged by the increasing penetration of the public into the private realm through digital innovations. “Privacy not only helps to protect individual autonomy,” writes Benjamin J. Goold (2010), “but also leaves us free to use that autonomy in the exercise of other fundamental rights like the right to free speech” (p. 43; see also Hildebrandt, 2006). Titus Stahl (2020) argues that privacy protection is necessary for intentional public behavior (such as political speech), as it contributes to both collective autonomy and democratic self-government.

This article adds yet another argument by assuming that advancing digitization reverses the genesis of a critical public sphere when public and private become increasingly blurred through transparency potentials and the associated convergence of social contexts. The argumentative viability of this thesis requires, as a first step, recourse to the private sphere’s conceptual sister, the public sphere. Habermas (1991) defines a critical public sphere as the notional locus made up of “privatized individuals coming together to form a public” (p. 51). Famously, he attributes the emergence of discourse free of domination to the rise of the bourgeoisie, or rather, to the structural shift from the public sphere of aristocratic society to that of bourgeois society, comprising coffeehouses, clubs, and salons. Underlying this thinking is the association of the public sphere with the principle of universal accessibility, that is, the principled inclusion of the public (Habermas, 1991: 37, 85). The emergence of industrial society and the concomitant urbanization in the nineteenth century—that is, the departure from rurality—are an integral part of the history of the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere. In other words, for Habermas, the public sphere was constituted as a bourgeois communication context that could only develop in an urban context. Here, one may once again refer to Bahrdt’s (1998) market metaphor, which he draws upon to define urbanity:

Where city formation takes place in the sense described by Max Weber, i.e., where everyday economic life is constantly related to the market, participation in a public sphere is not just a ceremonial exception for the mass of inhabitants but an everyday form of social behavior. This makes it possible and, to a certain extent, probable that other forms of the public sphere will also emerge, e.g., a political public sphere. (p. 83)

Long before Habermas, Simmel had already identified the critical potentials of urbanity. In his classic essay “The Metropolis and the Life of Spirit,” the sociologist states that the distanced—and thus less socially controlled—urban way of everyday life allows for more personal freedom and greater individualization. Through “individual autonomy and the formation of the uniquely personal element,” he writes, “the metropolis gains an entirely new worth in the world history of spirit” (Simmel (1903), as cited in Boy, 2021: 200).

Critical discourse thus presupposes the open intentionality of social contacts, which in turn requires the polarity of public and private. Seen in this light, the increased blurring of the boundaries between the two poles through digitization may sooner or later bring us back to the age of rurality, with a view to the collapse of public and private, that is, to a gradual re-ruralization of the public and private spheres.

As noted above, one of the greatest dangers to critical discourse is chilling effects (Penney, 2016, 2017) through increased social control, which violate forms of individual freedom that are constitutive of a critical public sphere, such as “comment, protest and other forms of peaceful civil action” (Goold, 2010: 43). Today, “one must reckon with the establishment of a public sphere at all times,” writes Wendelin (2020), for instance, through “the millions of users who can be found everywhere with smartphones and who can spread text information, photos and videos at lightning speed” (p. 34; see also Newell, 2019). The new urbanity is full of “technological artifacts” that threaten privacy, from electronic maps and CCTV cameras to drones and smart meters; as Véliz (2019) aptly puts it, “numerous cities around the world are becoming ‘smart’” (p. 23). Anything can be recorded, even the slightest infraction of the rules, and these data can be used against an individual because, at some point in time, that captured moment may contain exploitation potential.

The digital condition not only shapes and alters our daily lives but also affects the functioning of Western society as a whole. As one of the primary conditions of a democratic order, a critical public sphere depends on the polarity of public and private, which Bahrdt (1998) terms the essence of urban space. Digital privacy is about effectively reducing transparency potentials, which is not only an individual but even more a civic and societal imperative.

In addition, the spatial-sociological comparison can help to sharpen the conceptual contours of privacy risks. In the literature, it is easy to obtain the impression that the so-called horizontal dynamics of online privacy invasions correspond to a kind of linear process. This assumption leads directly to Thesis 3: Dynamics of privacy risks described at the horizontal level for the online era can be observed at the rural level, albeit in reverse order, suggesting that the digital society is faced with a circular process.

Expressly, the scalability of shared digital information and the collapse of social contexts condition the blurring of public and private (boyd, 2010; Marwick and boyd, 2014; Masur et al., 2019)—that is, the dissolution of what Bahrdt (1998) calls the polarity of public and private, which characterizes rurality, leading to a convergence of social contexts. These dynamics are thus intertwined: at the beginning and end is the dissolution of the boundaries between public and private.

Generally speaking, the spatial-sociological comparison challenges the conceptual distinction between horizontal and vertical privacy risks in the digital age, suggesting Thesis 4: The trend toward context convergence through the digital penetration of everyday life affects the sources from which privacy intrusions emanate, thereby calling into question the adequacy of the taxonomy of privacy risks.

Once again, it is essential to remember that rural and digital realities differ in their intricacy. However, even the comparatively “undercomplex” convergence of social contexts in rural structures does not allow for a hierarchization of privacy risks, as suggested, for example, by the division into horizontal and vertical privacy for the digital age. It is true that village interdependencies and their institutions, as they existed before the twentieth century, are no longer comparable to today’s rural relations of dependence (Mak, 2001). Nonetheless, a data network, including its gateway to privacy encroachment, can be expected to extend across different levels of hierarchy when “customary structures of power and influence converge on modern commercial institutions and instruments”—which is, incidentally, the breeding ground for corruption, as Findlay (1997: 30) shows in the case of micro-states.

Economists express similar concerns about the local level, “perhaps because of the greater intimacy and frequency of interactions between private individuals and local officials” (Treisman, 2000: 407), which can hardly be avoided through context convergence. The question of who abuses privacy is difficult to answer when (local) politicians (the vertical) make decisions that are based on data from private sources (the horizontal). However, this aspect is not considered in Bahrdt’s spatial-sociological model and is therefore only touched upon here in passing. An even stronger, deeper, and more complex (and commercial, one might add) exploitation of sociality can be observed today in the digital world (e.g. Zuboff, 2019). Against this background, a taxonomy of privacy risks should pay less attention to who invades privacy (horizontal and vertical/social and institutional privacy risks) and more attention to the interests and motives behind such privacy encroachments, thus focusing on the underlying power constellations.

Closing remarks

This article hopefully opens up several possible avenues for future empirical research in digital privacy studies. Such research could advance our understanding of the fragile boundary between publicness and privacy in a digitized society by revealing how similar experiences and mechanisms have unfolded in communities forced to negotiate this boundary in the pre-digitized world. One might think here not only of rural–urban differences—such as whether privacy risks are perceived differently depending on the spatial dimension—but, more generally, of localities where there is no or only a weak separation between the spheres of public authority and privacy, such as in regimes with pronounced state control. A comprehensive research program to further elaborate on the theses presented in this article could include the analysis of (1) the communication structures in remote areas and the underlying social challenges of the overlap between the private sphere (individual, family, friends) and the public sphere (encounters, meetings); (2) the impact of the dissolution of the private/public dichotomy on politics in seclusion and the political and regulatory efforts to mitigate the collapse of both spheres; (3) the processes of information exchange and dissemination in remote communities: that is, how information circulates among and between citizens and elites, with particular attention to the management of misinformation, rumors, and gossip; and (4) the use, reception, and evaluation of digital media by members of the lay public in secluded areas and how these individuals differ in their evaluation and appropriation of digital media compared with members of the lay public in urban areas.

In addition, this article also serves as a call to transcend the nation-state and instead consider privacy in spatial-sociological dimensions as an overarching, transversal category. Such localities, including secluded areas where the polarity between public and private is blurred, can teach us how to manage the digital challenges of our time. These social microcosms offer the opportunity to study on a small scale what concerns our societies on a large scale: how to cope with the potential downsides of a digital society where the private becomes public and the public becomes private. Digitization may dissolve the boundaries between the public and private spheres, but it can also help to develop resilience strategies against this dissolution and to propose new spaces.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank three anonymous reviewers and Thomas P. for their valuable comments, which were of great help in improving the quality of the manuscript. The author would also like to express her deepest gratitude to two good friends who live in a small village on a small island in the Baltic Sea and who, through numerous discussions, helped to bring the idea of the article to life.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Anke Fiedler

Author biography

Anke Fiedler (Dr. phil.) is a communication historian at the Department of Media and Communication at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. Her research focuses on the transformation of the public sphere as a result of media change and innovation in contemporary society.

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