6 The paradox of privacy on Instagram
Elisa Serafinelli, University of Sheffield
The publicness afforded by social media creates a paradox in terms of citizen expectations of privacy. While many appear to be comfortable with disclosing personal information on their Facebook and Twitter profiles, they remain wary and suspicious of efforts by government to intercept and use such data without their permission to do so. The subsequent need to ‘manage’ their online persona becomes an everyday activity for many social media users, even though they appear to be unable to guarantee the privacy of their personal information held by these sites.
This reflects the complexity of privacy in the digital age. Researchers should as Miller (2011) has gone as far as to suggest that contemporary notions of personal space do not exist in online environments. Users of Instagram, for instance, appear to engage in a collective ‘self-violation of privacy;’ they frequently share intimate details of their daily lives and provide personal information, such as their contact details, to a potential global audience. This publification of an individual’s private life stretches Foucault’s conceptualisation of the panopticon; physical activities such as ‘watching’ and ‘witnessing’, now replaced by the use of sites such as Instagram to piece together where people are, what they are doing, what they ate and with whom. There are broadly three main reasons why people choose to look at photos shared by users on Instagram: for visual pleasure, for imitation and for entertainment.
Instagram appears to function as a participatory panopticon. Instagrammers accept that their photos will be subject to some form of surveillance by other users and engage in these activities themselves. This is what Marwick (2012) refers to as ‘social surveillance,’ whereby users not only share content with the expectation that it will be viewed by others, but also strategically manage their online identity in order to appeal to an imagined audience. This also leads to what Whitson and Haggerty (2008) refer to as ‘the care of the virtual self,’ with Instagrammers constantly feeling the need to scrutinise what they, and their peers, upload to the photosharing site. In effect, privacy becomes almost a secondary concern for some users who perceive that being watched makes them ‘part of something.’
Depending on the context, users will disclose and redact personal information in order to connect with others, as well as to protect and reinforce existing social boundaries. In some cases this may even involve saying or doing something controversial on social media in order to gain attention from other users. Social media are also widely used as marketing tools for self-promotion by celebrities and reality television stars. For example, Kim Kardashian recently posted a nude selfie (see Figure 1) that generated many media headlines in March 2016. Good Morning Britain presenter Piers Morgan.branded Khardashian ‘desperat