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The Tragedy of the Communicative Commons: Privacy, Consumerism, and Metaphor Inc. | | | The Tragedy of the Communicative Commons
A powerful metaphor is useful. Metaphors provide a unifying concept for new and disparate problems. They also provide common language to link new challenges – like emerging privacy threats – to familiar ways of thinking and doing. This is essential to citizen interest and action. But privacy advocates have recruited metaphor to their cause since at least the 19th Century and what have they to show for it? Not much. Apathy remains the order of the day, with privacy interests often subsumed by the domain of consumerism. There are many reasons for this, but a key one, I would argue, is that advocates have failed to recognize that reliance on metaphors may do more harm than good in the informational privacy wars. | |
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< | First, privacy metaphors both embody and perpetuate the very consumerism they must battle. Consumerism, as noted, is the cultural driver of information privacy’s problems. Over and over people are willing trade off privacy for consumer convenience. Yet a metaphor cannot raise broad public awareness about privacy until it passes into popular cultural use which, of course, melds it to the fabric of consumerism which drives popular culture. The result is that every clever or original privacy metaphor, once ubiquitous enough to be effective, is co-opted by the forces it was conceived to oppose. We can see this with every famous or popular privacy metaphor. Take, first, the House-as-Castle metaphor invoked by Warren and Brandeis. Would they have guessed that in addition to offering a groundbreaking work on privacy, they were also implicitly affirming the growing commercial and consumer message of the day? That is, the ideal of the well furnished, stocked, and technologically equipped home. Or take privacy’s most famous metaphor Big Brother. Popularized in George Orwell’s dystopian text 1984, how ironic that Apple chose 1984 to appropriate the metaphor for commercial use. Apple, whose hasn't been great on privacy lately, used (or abused) a privacy metaphor to make computer ownership an ideal of personal empowerment. | >
> | First, privacy metaphors both embody and perpetuate the very consumerism they must battle. Consumerism, as noted, is the cultural driver of information privacy’s problems. Over and over people are willing trade off privacy for consumer convenience. Yet a metaphor cannot raise broad public awareness about privacy until it passes into popular cultural use which, of course, melds it to the fabric of consumerism which drives popular culture. The result is that every clever or original privacy metaphor, once ubiquitous enough to be effective, is co-opted by the forces it was conceived to oppose. We can see this with every famous or popular privacy metaphor. Take, first, the House-as-Castle metaphor invoked by Warren and Brandeis. Would they have guessed that in addition to offering a groundbreaking work on privacy, they were also implicitly affirming the growing commercial and consumer message of the day? That is, the ideal of the well furnished, stocked, and technologically equipped home. Or take privacy’s most famous metaphor Big Brother. Popularized in George Orwell’s dystopian text 1984, how ironic that Apple chose 1984 to appropriate the metaphor for commercial use. Apple, who hasn't been great on privacy lately, used (or abused) a privacy metaphor to make computer ownership an ideal of personal empowerment. | | | Second, a metaphor, rather than being a helpful tool, can constitute an obstacle for clear thinking and coordinated action on privacy. Metaphors, in a way, are constantly dying; as they pass into common or popular use their euphemistic and ironic force recedes, along with their usefulness. The final destination is cliché. That might sound like a linguistic problem, but dying metaphors—so loved by privacy theorists— also pose challenges for law and public policy by negatively affecting citizen action. The problem, Orwell pointed out, is that they promote laziness— their conventional and clichéd use allows citizens to avoid thinking for themselves and creating their own ideas or metaphors to tackle the challenges to be confronted. |
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