THE RESIGNIFICATION OF PRIVACY IN CONTEMPORITY: FROM SURVEILLANCE TO SELF-EXPOSURE
Abstract
The growing use of the Internet has been producing changes in the way people relate. For Jaron Lanier (2010; 2018), with the progress of information collection and management algorithms, users themselves began to have their habits overseen by systems that aim to optimize the user's relationship with products disclosed and sold in these spaces. The very circulation of information is now managed by algorithms aimed at selling products, and this is how users' habits are shaped by what is called the Bummer Machine. To discuss such effects, the concepts proposed by Jaron Lanier (2010; 2018) will be analyzed in light of the theoretical assumptions offered by Zygmunt Bauman (2014), which presents the post-panoptic idea, which concerns an inversion of values that now understands anonymity as punishment, and self-exposure to surveillance as a reward to be achieved at all costs. The aim of this study is to analyze the relationship between privacy and self-exposure in the modern world, from a qualitative approach based on a focus group. The data show that most of the university students interviewed admit to agreeing to self-exposure on the Internet and that media companies take advantage of informal data collection, making communication more assertive and persuasive to consumers.
