Dr Julia Fisher

Agnotology 2.2 Privacy vs. Secrecy

j fisher — Mon, 20 Feb 2023 00:14:13 +0000

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, 2^nd 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.

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Agnotology 2.1: Narrowing our focus

j fisher — Fri, 17 Feb 2023 09:00:01 +0000

“We are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance. Ignorance is not just a blank space on a person’s mental map. It has contours and coherence, and for all I know rules of operation as well. So as a corollary to writing about what we know, maybe we should add getting familiar with our ignorance.”

-Thomas Pynchon, 1984

What don’t you know? Why don’t you know it? Who is benefiting from your ignorance?

The hallmark of human society and culture, and potentially foundational to our success as a species, is our ability to share information. This ability is highlighted, of course, in language. But it’s also grounded in the inherently social nature of the human organism. Early in our development, we come to appreciate the support and cooperation of others – mom? siblings? – that scaffold our success. Much of the work in the sixties and seventies that aimed for efficient speech synthesis and recognition by computers came to rely on the Cooperative Principles put forward by Grice. For a time, success of that whole exercise rested on the assumption that in productive conversation, we tell each other what we need to know. No more and no less.

However, long before they leave the halls of an elementary school education, most children know there’s a lot more going on in active conversation than Grice’s Cooperative Principles can account for. People tell you what they WANT you to know. Humans have their own agendas, drives, motives. We learn early on that people are individually and variably trustworthy. We proceed at our own risk with our faith in the answers they provide to questions, or the information they offer spontaneously.

But we have somewhat different assumptions about print media. People write articles or books because they have a story they want to tell or information they want to disseminate. For most readers, there’s a willing suspension of disbelief and recognition that fiction is not fact, and conversely, that material purported to be fact is credible on its face. But, as suggested, authors may have an agenda. Reading carries with it the responsibility of critical evaluation of the material presented. Hence the cautionary ‘Don’t believe everything you read’.

Yet most of us assign a special status to journalism. An important tenet of our news establishment is that knowledge of some events or activities may be useful to the general public, even if they don’t know which questions to ask. It becomes the journalist’s responsibility to ask the right questions and publish the answers they have gathered. Hence, our ‘free press’ and a journalistic tradition that supports sharing generically and honestly any and all information that comes across the editor’s desk has become an expectation and assumption for most Americans.

But, even such an active search for information can yield only what people are willing to share. If a reporter asks pertinent and cogent questions, and manages to collect the appropriate information, there is still a potentially cumbersome further step to assure its dissemination. The entire exercise is costly. The journalist expects to get paid for time and expenses and the publishing process incurs additional charges. Who’s footing that bill? The end result is that the ‘free’ press isn’t free. An active decision can be made anywhere along the way to simply withhold the information.

In 1976, Carl Jensen at Sonoma State University founded ‘Project Censored’. The ongoing mission of the project is to ‘document systemic gaps and slant in corporate news coverage’. (Roth & Macek, 2022, p. 26). The resulting publications over the past 46 years have amassed a chilling array of news stories that are arguably injurious omissions from the public knowledge base. A number of these stories will be shared here in the coming months. In some cases, it may be obvious who has benefitted from these intentional gaps. In others, an important charge to readers is to identify the individual or organization that has censured the information or that may have benefitted from your ignorance.

Roth, A. L., & Macek, S. (2022). The top censored stories and media analysis of 2021-2022 – Introduction. Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2023. Huff, M. and Roth, A. L. editors. Seven Stories Press, New York, NY. 23-29.

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Agnotology 1.1: Definitions

j fisher — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 18:27:19 +0000

Definitions:
The intent of this blog is to address the very important topic of ignorance. When people work to communicate, they often encounter misunderstandings because of a difference in the way that they are using some of their words. This might not be obvious until something makes it clear that they are talking – or working at cross-purposes. In order for this blog to be productive, it will be important to confirm that we are all sharing the same meaning for the critical terms. For this first edition, we will define ‘Agnotology’.

To begin our conversation, agnotology means – in brief – ‘the study of ignorance’. I say in brief because there are different types of ignorance and different causes for its occurrence. While we intend to introduce and perhaps address a significant number of them in this forum, we cannot provide an in-depth treatment of them all.

To date, the most influential treatment of agnotology is the Stanford Press, 2008 publication ‘Agnotology: The Making & Unmaking of Ignorance’ edited by Proctor and Schiebinger. I will be relying on these authors (and their contributors to the volume) for their characterization of ignorance throughout the coming posts, as we look at a variety of topics through this lens. We can start by imagining that ignorance represents a void; a space where some information or knowledge could or might reside, but at this point in time simply does not. Viewed in this way, ignorance takes on a shape and a mass that can vary in significant ways in different people.

Types of Ignorance:
Proctor and Schiebinger’s conceptualization makes no claims as to the actual existence of the missing information. That is, we might be ignorant of something because the data doesn’t yet exist. It might seem on the surface that we can’t investigate that type of ignorance and therefore, we can safely eliminate the area from our study. We might consider this the unknowable by virtue of the fact that there isn’t some place we could go look it up to fill the vacuum. However, importantly this might mean that the methods/tools or environment for observation are not available to us. This should rule out all of the knowledge that humans are striving to acquire, but have not yet succeeded. Not so fast! It is possible that the information itself might well exist, but for deliberate efforts to prevent our being able to get to it through limitations on the research.

The flipside would be the types of ignorance where the knowledge does exist, but some individuals possess it while others do not. Proctor notes that ‘the distribution of ignorance is unequal’ (Proctor, 2008, p.6). That suggests that this information is knowable, and takes us to a discussion of causes of ignorance.

Causes of ignorance:
Certainly, ignorance can be attributed to a variety of causes. Some are passive constructs. As a species, those things that humans don’t know are what Proctor calls native ignorance or infantile absence. As young people (infants, toddlers, children) we experience ignorance as a function of lack of experience with or exposure to certain information – what Proctor calls innocence. Another cause of ignorance, which Proctor notes is ultimately caused by a choice – he has termed selective ignorance. For example, when a college student declares a major in English literature, it can be imagined that they are relinquishing claims to a serious understanding of chemistry or tennis. Both ignorance of innocence and selective ignorance might appear to be outside of the scope of this blog. However, as our public schools were conceived as a deliberate and strategic effort to address the deficits of growing children, educators, administrators, politicians, and parents work to identify the information that children are exposed to. Similarly, even at the university level, when programs are designed to require certain courses, or courses are designed to require certain information ignorance is no longer passive.

The original impetus for launching this blog and the causes of most interest for our focus are active constructs. These are the areas in which ignorance is intentional (knowledge deliberately hidden or explicitly forgotten and lost or discredited), manufactured (through publication of dis- or misinformation), or engineered as a strategic exercise. An impressive array of actors are working to limit access to information or to discredit legitimate information. I expect there will be areas that many people will confirm as important or necessary to withhold information. As any parent who has implemented parental controls on their children’s television or digital engagement will attest, there may be valid reasons to filter, restrict, or censure information for young minds. There will be many who support political choices to keep certain information secret or confidential from general dissemination to the public for some perceived benefit to the citizenry.

Without question, there are limits to our time and our energy to research and to know everything there is to know. We have to trust that somebody is minding the store and that they know what they are doing. The primary goal of this blog is to encourage you to ask yourself the questions: What don’t I know? Why don’t I know this? How is my ignorance impacting my quality of life? Is someone (who?) benefiting from my ignorance? These questions suggest also that at some point in future posts, we will address the motivations for active ignorance.

References
Proctor, R. N. (2008). Agnotology: A missing term to describe the cultural production of ignorance (and its study). In R. N. Proctor & L. Schiebinger, L. (Eds.), Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance,. (1-33). Stanford University Press.
Proctor, R. N., & Schiebinger, L. (2008). Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance. Stanford University Press.?

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