Title
Has a digital civil society evolved enough to protect privacy?
Document Type
Article
Publication details
Adrian, A 2012, 'Has a digital civil society evolved enough to protect privacy?', Alternative Law Journal, vol. 37. no. 3, pp. 183-185.
Peer Reviewed
Peer-Reviewed
Abstract
The internet and social networks are not just new ways of entertaining, educating and engaging — they are a new space, comprising new persons in new communities. Each person in a contemporary, post-industrial society exists as both a physical entity and a disparate set of records left as the traces of that person’s movement through the world of telecommunications and computing.1 We have expressed ourselves, met others and created things online. We now have a visible, external amplification of our imagination — a cybernetic doppelganger. We can use the graphical, networked screen to create vibrant representations of personal identity (ie the avatar), while simultaneously producing contextspecific reputations in online communities separate from and independent of our offline characteristics. Social hypermedia systems, user-adaptive data collectors, have evolved into a compelling story about individuals recreating themselves and extending their identities into cyberspace.