Self-exposure as a Way of Life. Privacy Tradeoff and Datafied Citizenship

This empirical research-based paper, grounded in media sociology, seeks to advance how datafication transforms citizenship by reconstructing practices and accompanying tensions of “doing” privacy. Upon the analysis of 31 in-depth interviews with activists, we ask how privacy is approached and done by people who perceive it as both important and vulnerable and who compromise their privacy with public outreach. To encapsulate two strands of media research—on privacy and social media visibility—in the context of scholarship on datafied citizenship, we introduce the theoretical concept of self-exposure as a way of life. The concept, we argue, highlights ongoing tradeoffs between securing privacy and being visible in digital environments, and by this, helps to learn the complex status of datafied citizenship.

This research is supported by the Polish National Science Centre, Poland (Narodowe Centrum Nauki) grant: 2020/37/B/HS6/00941, and by the Polish Ministry of Science under “Regionalna Inicjatywa Doskonałości” program.