Agnotology 2.2 Privacy vs. Secrecy
Our post 2.1 introduced the idea of journalistic responsibility to research and reveal information potentially beneficial to the public. Some of our subsequent entries will offer insights into various topics and stories which were identified as legitimate news stories which did not appear in the mainstream media – this decision to quash these stories has therefore contributed to the continued ignorance of the general public. As suggested previously, this engineered ignorance most has some beneficiary.
This post will take a brief detour to address the notions of privacy and secrecy and their complementary relationship to ignorance, within the realm of both investigative reporting and personal relationships. Where the boundaries lie for these concepts within any news story may be hotly debated, as a reporter and the subject of a news story may have very different perspectives on this question. A decision to publish, based on the public’s right to know, may conflict with the subject’s right to privacy, and this result highlights the differences between our social constructs of privacy and secrecy.
An argument that is sometimes offered in favor of releasing information to the news media is that certain organizations or individuals occupy such a public position within the system that information about them or their activities exists essentially within the public domain. Therefore, when does a prominent individual have a right to privacy?
As Warren and Laslett (1977) suggest, privacy is a consensual agreement to withhold information while secrecy is a one-sided decision to conceal behaviors. These authors suggest that there is a moral dilemma presented by invoking privacy. Our willingness to respect a lack of openness (and therefore a right to privacy) becomes a reflection of our inherent level of trust that the subject’s behaviors are at least neutral or appropriate behaviors for the subject. In those cases where we do not have trust of the individual or suspect that the behaviors are morally compromised, privacy morphs into secrecy. If they’re not doing anything wrong, what do they have to hide?
“Secrecy, therefore, is an even more extreme form of denial of access to others than is privacy—for not only is access denied when secrecy is maintained, but the most successful secret occurs when knowledge of denial of access (the secret’s very existence) is also withheld” (Warren & Laslett, 1977, p.45; see also Simmel, 1950).
It is also true that the sharing of information will be perceived as appropriate to not just trust but by extension to intimacy. It feeds on itself. The more we share, that greater intimacy and openness will be perceived as trustworthy and those issues that we may withhold are then recognized as legitimate areas for privacy such that we will willingly tolerate their maintenance. Liming (2023) suggests that the sharing of stories in casual social situations is critical to our psychological wellbeing – a notion articulated decades earlier in Jourard (1971).
The implication here is difficult to miss: The more we withhold, the more we isolate ourselves and the more we imply that we are engaging in behaviors that are illicit or immoral. While this is being presented as a simple matter of opening up and being trusted and accepted, of course we all know that social relationships are much more complex. TMI and WTMI are legitimate acronyms as we may struggle with someone revealing more than we are prepared to process. Navigating a specific relationship requires identification of the level of receptivity of our friends and our own personal boundaries. My son’s work in IT security suggested an analogy with ‘access’; there is a hierarchy of permissions. Certain things I may allow you to know, while I withhold others until you have achieved some level of trust? Intimacy?
Jourard, S. (1971). The transparent self, 2nd Ed. Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York.
Liming, S. (2023). Hanging out: The radical power of killing time. Melville House: Brooklyn, NY
Simmel, G. (1950) The secret and the secret society. In K. W. Wolff (ed. And trans.), The sociology of Georg Simmel, Free Press: New York.
Warren, C. & Laslett, B. (1977). Privacy and secrecy: A conceptual comparison. Journal of Social Issues, 33 (3), 43-51.
