Fifteen Minutes of Privacy: Privacy, Sociality, and Publicity on Social Network Sites

In celebration of a burgeoning celebrity pop culture, Andy Warhol famously proclaimed that in the future, everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. Almost half a century later, being public online has become so easy that one wonders how, in the future, one may be truly private for 15 minutes. Both statements reflect the distance that separates the self from privacy, publicity, and that which lies in between: sociality. In contemporary democracies, privacy is recognized as a basic human right – the “right to be let alone,” as defined by the landmark Warren and Brandeis (1890, p. 195) Harvard Law Review article. Allegedly, Warren was inspired to write this article following the intrusive news coverage of his wife’s society parties and reached a breaking point after the invasive press coverage of his daughter’s private wedding party. Given the prevalence of media platforms that could so easily render a private event public, Warren and Brandeis (1890) saw it necessary to assert the right to privacy, or, in their words, “the right to an inviolate personality” (p. 211). In modern societies, this distance between public and private continues to dwindle, as contemporary media further blur the lines separating private from public. Social media in particular enable individuals to connect with multiple audiences on online social planes that are neither conventionally public nor entirely private. In the publicly private and privately public era of social media, friends or their acquaintances, not the press, would have tagged photographs of Ms. Warren’s guests, making them publicly accessible to outside networks and third parties. The question of privacy in a digital era, and in particular, in the Social Web realm, resurfaces as the structural affordances of networked spaces remediate the texture of publicity, sociality, and privacy. People digitally record and archive their