Privacy And New Media Argumentative Essays Examples

As numbers of internet users surge, privacy concerns become more complicated. Over last few years, upsurge in using social media networks has led to privacy concerns as users continue to relinquish privacy, voluntarily or not, during interactions. Notably, government control has been one issue of increasing concern. In nascent democracies, government control over new media platforms is criticized as censorship and anti-democracy moves. In more developed democracies, breaching privacy is more of a commercial issue than a political one. Installing cookies into users' browsers is nothing but an established practice by which companies seek to gather as much information about consumers as possible. Similarly, governments seek to breach users' privacy for different reasons. Frequent justifications for privacy breaches include national security concerns, more control over obscene content and prevention of child porn and abuse. This argument seeks to explore privacy as a public concern issue.
For long, humans have continued to cherish privacy as a decidedly personal, natural right. One means to control humans, since early human history, has been of breaching privacy to exercise acts of coercion. Similarly, in an era when new media is one dominant medium of communication, seeking to control individuals and groups by governments continues to be an issue of public concern. Interestingly, new media – particularly social media platforms – are developing a state of affairs by which privacy becomes a much debated question, particularly in public space. This is further emphasized as governments set in. Given recent state interventions in many countries world over, privacy champions are raising flags as to what should be marked as state limit of control. Typically, all governmental control is rejected as evil, malicious and ill-intentioned. The underlying assumption of similar claims posits governments' agency in breaching privacy when, in fact, more often than not, privacy relinquishment could be a sheer voluntary act by individuals, acts governments might exploit for different reasons, not necessarily against public good (Woo).
The question of privacy becomes further complicated if, given individuals' voluntary relinquishment of personal information for interaction purposes, applications such as geowebs call into question conventional understandings of what constitutes privacy (Elwood and  Leszczynski). Indeed, as information leakage becomes a far more sophisticated process, involving a lot of pieces as opposed to single or limited sets of information pieces. Spatial orientation and, indeed information in general, in geospatial applications is a case in point. Consider, for example, Google Street View or Twitter GeoAPI. By choosing to use either, users relinquish privacy snippets pre-set by developer / publisher and are not negotiated by ultimate user. This is, however, one layer of analysis. A deeper layer still involves crafted, intentional plans by concerned stakeholders to make use of such information, such as governments.
Governments, indeed, are usually held culprit of each and every breach in any domain. Throughout history, people have mistrusted governments for different reasons. Now, given new media's – particularly social networks' – unique nature as platforms of dynamic interaction, governments should not, indeed, be held responsible, let alone being culprits, for privacy breaches – nor, indeed, should anyone being held culprit or anything for tapping into new media for information, entertainment or whatever reason. Of course, maliciousness does occur. Yet, given governments' long history of mistrust, social media users are more inclined to point to governments as manipulators.
If anything, new media – and social media in particular – should be regarded instead as domains of collected actions in which meaning making is constantly negotiated. Accordingly, privacy, as well, should not be fixated at some presumed – and limited – meaning of physical information uncovered about a specific individual or group but as a state by which a user assumes one status and moves on to assume another. This is not to deny, of course, significance of physical information. After all, criminals are "ambushed" by means of physical, spatial information. Privacy should, instead, be investigated as a negotiative act of opting in or out of (virtual) public space. If viewed as a repository to share information – which, eerily enough, has been Internet's original conception – privacy will no longer be viewed as something individuals strive to hide and governments seek to uncover but as an object of constant negotiation.
In conclusion, growing concerns for privacy has grown as numbers of Internet users continue to soar. Typically, government has been viewed as a culprit in privacy breach debate. However, privacy has been relinquished by individuals themselves and governments have only tapped into such information for reasons which might not be necessarily against public good or represent any breach of individual liberties. Further, privacy acquires different meaning for geoweb applications. This makes new media a platform of meaning-making and negotiation and dispels as unfit privacy as fixed concept by which is meant mere physical information which individuals or groups hoard and for which governments are after. If anything, in an era marked by information management secrets, if any, no longer reside in pieces of information per se but in networks across which information are carried. These, in fact, should, contrary to common belief, be left open for meaning-making not closing for cliques and clans. Ultimately, privacy is what users make meaning of, not what is held as fixed in any one's or group's meaning.

Works Cited

Elwood, Sarah, and Agnieszka Leszczynski. "Privacy, reconsidered: New representations, data practices, and the geoweb." Geoforum 42.1 (2011):  6–15. ScienceDirect. Web. 17 Mar. 2015.
Woo, Jisuk. "The right not to be identified: privacy and anonymity in the interactive media environment." New Media & Society 8.6 (2006): 949-967. SAGE Journals. Web. 17 Mar. 2015.