On her book The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America
Cover Interview of April 08, 2018
In a nutshell
Privacy—I probably need convince no one—looms large in the
United States today, sparked by concerns about NSA spying as well as social
media profiling, facial recognition software as well as genetic testing. It is the
vocabulary Americans reach for to mark the boundary between themselves and the
society at large: the government, of course, but also corporations,
researchers, marketers, employers, schools, and neighbors. Indeed, for something
we think of as by definition cordoned off from public life, privacy courses
through U.S. political culture.
My book charts how and why privacy became a fixture—even fixation—of
the U.S. public sphere in the twentieth century. The growth of the central state
and social institutions is part of the answer, along with the creation of ever-more
sophisticated technologies of surveillance. But the larger story I tell is the
emergence of a “knowing society,” one that sought to understand, govern, and
minister to its members by scrutinizing them in fuller and finer detail—often
with the support and cooperation of those same citizens. By pursuing the
problem of how Americans would, and should, be known by their own society, I hope
to offer a new angle on the contentious career of privacy in modern life.
A knowing society, after all, carried rewards as well as
risks. New techniques for rendering individuals legible, from credit reports
and CCTV cameras to psychological testing, promised opportunity and security,
even self-understanding. But being known too well—through the monitoring of one’s
sexual or consumption habits, for instance—could threaten personal autonomy.
This was a delicate calibration. To remain unrecognizable to
society’s authorities was in some contexts a sign of privilege. In others, it
was a form of disempowerment, with recognition basic to enacting one’s
membership in society. Being traceable in a national criminal or DNA database
was a different matter than being identifiable to a benefits-granting program
like Social Security. In this way, the question of whether one could be known
accurately and authentically—and on one’s own terms—animated privacy’s
prominence in American public life.
I track American debates over the known citizen, from the
era of “instantaneous photography” in the late nineteenth century to our own
age of big data. Across the last century and a half, tabloid journalism and new
technologies, welfare bureaucracies and police tactics, market research and
personality testing, scientific inquiry and computer data banks, tell-all memoirs
and social media all posed profound questions about how to fix the line between
the modern person and the collectivities to which she or he belonged.
These practices could not help but alter Americans’ ideas
about privacy. In entertaining new understandings of what could be asked and
what could be said, what could be exposed and what should be disclosed, citizens
shifted the contents of “public” and “private.” By the twenty-first century, I contend,
they had fundamentally redrawn the borders separating the private from the
public self (for the whole story, you have to read the book).
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
Privacy—I probably need convince no one—looms large in the United States today, sparked by concerns about NSA spying as well as social media profiling, facial recognition software as well as genetic testing. It is the vocabulary Americans reach for to mark the boundary between themselves and the society at large: the government, of course, but also corporations, researchers, marketers, employers, schools, and neighbors. Indeed, for something we think of as by definition cordoned off from public life, privacy courses through U.S. political culture.
My book charts how and why privacy became a fixture—even fixation—of the U.S. public sphere in the twentieth century. The growth of the central state and social institutions is part of the answer, along with the creation of ever-more sophisticated technologies of surveillance. But the larger story I tell is the emergence of a “knowing society,” one that sought to understand, govern, and minister to its members by scrutinizing them in fuller and finer detail—often with the support and cooperation of those same citizens. By pursuing the problem of how Americans would, and should, be known by their own society, I hope to offer a new angle on the contentious career of privacy in modern life.
A knowing society, after all, carried rewards as well as risks. New techniques for rendering individuals legible, from credit reports and CCTV cameras to psychological testing, promised opportunity and security, even self-understanding. But being known too well—through the monitoring of one’s sexual or consumption habits, for instance—could threaten personal autonomy.
This was a delicate calibration. To remain unrecognizable to society’s authorities was in some contexts a sign of privilege. In others, it was a form of disempowerment, with recognition basic to enacting one’s membership in society. Being traceable in a national criminal or DNA database was a different matter than being identifiable to a benefits-granting program like Social Security. In this way, the question of whether one could be known accurately and authentically—and on one’s own terms—animated privacy’s prominence in American public life.
I track American debates over the known citizen, from the era of “instantaneous photography” in the late nineteenth century to our own age of big data. Across the last century and a half, tabloid journalism and new technologies, welfare bureaucracies and police tactics, market research and personality testing, scientific inquiry and computer data banks, tell-all memoirs and social media all posed profound questions about how to fix the line between the modern person and the collectivities to which she or he belonged.
These practices could not help but alter Americans’ ideas about privacy. In entertaining new understandings of what could be asked and what could be said, what could be exposed and what should be disclosed, citizens shifted the contents of “public” and “private.” By the twenty-first century, I contend, they had fundamentally redrawn the borders separating the private from the public self (for the whole story, you have to read the book).