The Public Domain: Social Surveillance In Everyday Life

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“There is nothing private about our lives”

In our technological age it is basically impossible to keep anything private. We have grown up in a society where our reputations and perceptions of people are determined through social media. Times have changed and so have our forms of communication and social interaction. We have lost privacy in our lives due to our social and technological advances that make information about people easily accessible. Through, “Too Much Privacy?” by Steven L. Nock, the author argues that “Americans enjoy more privacy today than any of their ancestors did”(Nocks 101). This is difficult for me to grasp because of responses from my classmates and simply growing up in the time period that he is referring too. These idea of Nock are connected to “The Public Domain: Social surveillance in Everyday Life” by Alice E. Marwick. Marwick expresses his ideas on social surveillance and how it relates to our privacy and everyday lives. Websites like Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and Instagram, offer an immense number of ways to communicate with your peers electronically. It is extremely useful for keeping in touch with your friends, family, and acquaintances. In some cases it is so easy to communicate and transfer information to a point where it becomes dangerous to your future and well-being. Alice E. Marwick, author of “The Public Domain: Social Surveillance in Everyday Life”, brings up the idea of social surveillance. In the article, social surveillance is described as “closely examining content created by others and looking at one’s own content through other people’s eyes”(Marwick 378). Our privacy is being taken away with the ability to easy stalk people. Its something that is becoming normal in our lives. People are used to finding out information online so much to the point where our privacy is at stake and social interactions themselves are at stake. In Marwick’s article, there is an interview with a girl named Abigail. Abigail is asked the question, “Will your mother ever misunderstand something that you post on Facebook?”(Marwick 384). She then begins to tell a story about how a simple inside joke that was posted online with her friend from school confused her mother. This interview is very eye opening. It proves that things over the internet can be easily mistaken. We are building our reputation and personality online and from the eyes of other people our messages are being confused. During social surveillance people are making ideas up in their mind that may be different then what u intended. If your mother does not even know what you are talking about imagine what someone who knows you even less would think you are talking about. This is detrimental to our reputation. In the past you would not be able to post information or inside jokes online so the opportunity for this to negatively affect you reputation would not have even been possible. Privacy back in the day was protected by the lack of technology. Throughout Nocks readings he stresses the importance of family and how it relates to our privacy in the past and how we are straying from it today. In the past family life was more of group collaboration. Everyone in the family was responsible for each other, “By custom and law, the head of the household has been held accountable for the actions of all members of the family”(Nock 103). The more your family was respected the more privacy you got because your neighbors knew basically everything about you. That was how communities worked back in the day. Your family had to know everything about you because they did not want you to ruin the family name. Someone always kept a close eye on you. Nocks uses this to support his idea that people have more privacy today because we no longer are strictly connected to the family. We have strayed from these ideas and they have had an effect on our privacy. We also have developed a new stage in growing up that
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