Private faces, public places

Privacy and the Urban Imagination
Christena Nippert-Eng and Jay Melican, Illinois Inst of Technology

• “privacy work”: defending and bounding private spaces
  
• privacy as umbrella (Anita Allen)
  
• “Islands of Privacy” research
  
  exercise: emptying wallet and purse and asking people to identify what is private, public, or ambiguous
  
  “economy of strangers” where people must publicize their ID using mediating institutions but want to withhold as much information as possible
  
  development of flexible ID management tools
  
  “public” and “private” defined through perceived consequences of revelation
  
  these definitions are individual and arrived at through scenario-based reasoning
  
  “scenario-ization”: elaborating meaning through hypothesis – “reality-fed imagination”
  
  privacy is “collusive,” requiring “civil inattention” (Goffman, natch)
  
  good community in some ways equals good privacy
  
  what’s new is the extent of privacy fears (fear of loss of control over personal information)
  
  fed by: mobile technology, centralized, hackable databases, and the feeling of being surrounded by unseen, unknown strangers
  

Cafes and crowds

Eric Laurier, Glasgow

• social history of cafes and coffeehouses
  
• one view: the value of a café is in its diversity (Magary)
  
• how do customers evaluate cafes?
  
  at-a-glance analysis
  
  acting/imagining self as a visitor to the city, a stranger
  
• the cosmopolitan café is just one kind of café, with its own problems
  
• each café cannot be everyone’s refuge; it must be different from the stret
  
• Norman Klein, The History of Forgetting