Responses on Questions of the Article Critique

Thanks for such great questions on my article critique as follows! I will try my best to answer every question I received.

Q: Is there a reason why author discuss discretion besides personal data privacy issues? Does it affect author’s research object if she/he mess up with the two concepts.

A: I think confusion between discretion and privacy is common among many people when they try to determine what is private and what is not. In a sense, these two concepts always go hand in hand. If the research question is on personal privacy protection, I will not take the authors' stance as mistaken. However, what they try to discuss is how researchers of learning analytics can conduct their studies without violating privacy, so the privacy here should be treated as an objective issue that can be observed by different stakeholders rather than something totally up to the agent him/herself.

Q: I’m intrigued by the point about the dynamic definition (or not?) of privacy? Do you think we have the right to first grant access to our data and then revoke it? That seems to fit with the analogy of inviting someone to your home, but it sounds like it would make things difficult for the researchers’ planning.

A: That's true! The other critique I mentioned in my article but not the presentation is about the low feasibility of someone's right to withdraw his/her data after being collected, which is also suggested by the authors. And this kind of volatility of one's discretion is an important reason why I propose to distinguish privacy from discretion clearly. Moreover, I suggest that dynamics of privacy according to the context and time could be better taken advantage of if the authors tried to draw proper lines to differentiate private and public cyberspaces with regard to the three dynamic boundaries of digital privacy they bring up in the paper, i.e. discourse, identity and temporality.

Q: Could you explain me more about what you meant by “just because you invite people doesn’t mean house is not private?”

A: It is an analogy I use to tell the difference between discretion and privacy. As my answer to the first question shows, physical privacy in modern society can be an objective concept that is well-defined in law. Although I can walk into the host's residence by invitation this time, I am not sure if I can the same invitation or permission next time. And such uncertainty might well hinder the procedure of research if researchers merely rely on users' generosity.

Q: How could we reach a consensus of defining the boundaries of privacy, when we all come from different backgrounds?

A: It is a very good question that I expected the authors to address in their paper but they didn't. One reason accounting for it might be the difficulty of reaching a consensus among people with diverse backgrounds as you said. But in spite of the diversity, protocols signed by different online groups are likely to be a good way to define the objective boundary of digital privacy. Of course, before the agreement is reached, a large quantity of negotiation will be inevitable.

Appendix to Session 5 The Johari Window & The Bundle Theory

Questions on identity never fail to intrigue and haunt us from cradle to grave. What we discussed in class yesterday can date back to the very ancient ones, e.g. "Who am I?", "Is my mind identical to myself?", and etc. At a moment, something just flashed into my mind and delighted me to connect these new items to knowledge I obtained before. I believe it is just about the magic of a profound topic and I really want to share those inspirations with you all. Apart from an interesting article on the uselessness of time management and a famous poem I posted on this blog during the reading, here are the other two issues I would like to share. Let's enjoy the pleasure of thinking!

• The Johari Window

It is a cognitive psychology technique that we talked about in class. Abbey's pretty chalk drawing is attached below. According to whether one's self is known to him/herself or known to others, this "self" can be divided into four parts (i.e. windows), arena (known to self & known to others), blind spots (not known to self but known to others), hidden (known to self but not known to others), and unknown (not known to self & not known to others). This structure is useful for us to gain an insight into how one's self and identities are formed with regard to one's relationships with people around him/her. As I suggested, since this structure was put forward in 1955, more than 60 years ago, some modifications can be applied to it to make it more up-to-date. For instance, the self once hidden may now be exposed to some people online, though it is under a mask of an anonymous avatar. Also, the self once we were blind to may be easier to know with the help of some functions provided by social media, such as labels from friends and friends' impressions.

But what should be emphasized here is that "The Johari Window", strictly speaking, is not a theory or a model. It is just a technique that "help people better understand their relationship with themselves and others" (Wikipedia). "During the exercise, subjects are given a list of a few adjectives out of which they need to pick some that they feel describe their own personality. The subject's peers are then given the same list, and each pick equal number of adjectives that describe the subject. These very adjectives are then inserted into a grid" (Wikipedia). Hence, it does not ensure that each one of the four windows really exist, the "unknown" grid in particular. Besides, it by itself does not tell us what are the relationships among these windows and why. If someone is interested in it, he/she can search for more resources that explain the underlying mechanism.

• The Ego Theory VS.The Bunddle Theory

These two theories I learned as an undergraduate occurred to me when our group discussed that essentialism is much more western than eastern. But how indeed do the two different cultures think about one's "self"? You are likely to find some clues below.

The first one, Ego Theory, claims that a person's continued existence over time can only be explained by the continued existence over time of an ego or a subject of experience. The reason why all my experiences are unified is because there is a single person, a single ego, that experiences them all.

The second one, Bunddle Theory, claims that there are many different series of mental events (thoughts, sensations, desires, etc.) that are unified by causal relations. It is like a bundle of pencils (mental events) tied together by a string (causal relations). So there are no persons. There are just bundles of bodies, brains, and mental events.

The bundle theory seemed to be first brought out by the Buddhist, Nagasena. He took the chariot as an analogy.

A chariot is made of five parts: a cart, two wheels, an axle, and a pole. We know that the chariot is not identical to any one of its parts, but is the chariot identical to all the parts together? Nagasen says, "no!" He takes it as a mistake to regard the chariot as an additional thing besides its five components. The word "chariot" is used simply to refer to the five parts but nothing more since all parts of a chariot are more "real" than the chariot itself, i.e. the parts of a chariot can exist even when the chariot does not. (The description of the theories above is adapted from the material in one of my undergraduate courses on philosophy taught by Daniel Lim in Renmin University of China.)

However, you may say that a human being is very different from a chariot. The existence of a self is the prerequisite of the existence of our different slices. Isn't it indisputable? Let me remind you of a famous clinical case called "the split-brain case".

Split-brain cases occur when the corpus callosum, the bundle of nerves that connect the two hemispheres of the brain, are severed. Although the patient behaves almost as a normal person after this effective surgery for refractory epilepsy, he/she will have some unusual reactions while taking the experiment shown in the picture above. The subject of the experiment is asked to pick up what he/she see on a word board with left hand and in the meantime speak it out loud. When he/she is shown a word board with "key" on the left and "ring" on the right, the subject will pick up a key while speak the word, "ring". (Please google it for more details.)

In this case, the subject has two different visual experiences. In seeing each word, he/she is not aware of seeing the other. He/she has two separate streams of consciousness and in each only one word is seen. Moreover, these two streams of consciousness are unaware of each other! Does it mean that there are two persons that share a same body?

What's more, Nagasena is not alone. There are even followers in the western world who share the similar idea on personal identity. The British philosopher, Derek Parfit, may be the most famous among them. I won't talk more about him here since it is far beyond the scope of this passage. But if you are curious about his story and theories, please search for more information online or in the library. It will certainly be a nice journey to go.

Sharing: A Poem for Us as Homozapines, "No Man is An Island"

Are we atomized and separated in this digital age? Are we even tired of just thinking to communicate with people face-to-face?

Here is a famous poem that may remind us of what it means to live as a member of a community and what we are to one another. Enjoy the poem and video^-^

No Man is An Island

written by John Donne (1573-1631), 

an English poet and a cleric in the Church of England

No man is an island,

Entire of itself,

Every man is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less.

As well as if a promontory were.

As well as if a manor of thy friend's

Or of thine own were:

Any man's death diminishes me,

Because I am involved in mankind,

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; 

It tolls for thee.

Sharing: "Time management is only making our busy lives worse"

Sherry Turkle's question that "are we losing the time to take our time?" reminds me of an interesting and somewhat bluffing article -- "Time management is only making our busy lives worse".

While we are so familiar with the life checking our watch or phone to keep pace with the time and schedule, the fact is that "as the historian E.P. Thompson highlighted half a century ago, before the Industrial Revolution clocks were largely irrelevant"(quoted from the same article). If you like to know how "time management" makes our lives worse, the link below will lead you to that interesting article on this issue. Enjoy reading!

Time management is only making our busy lives worse
http://qz.com/447193/time-management-is-only-making-our-busy-lives-worse/

MSTU4020: Identity: Relating the Self to the Social

I am so delighted that this time we are going to talk about our identities and  relationships to the social online.

Two weeks ago, I set down a question mark beside a line of an article in Session 3 and did the same in another article last week. I just let them alone until I read articles for this session and happen to find that both of them have something to do with this week's topic.

Let me first quote those lines from former readings for you.

Quotes:

• "Good user interface design produces accessible and universally usable applications that enable solitary reading or social interactions that meet the needs of diverse user populations (Rainie and Tancer, 2007)."

     ——Preece, J. & Shneiderman, B. (2009). The reader-to-leader framework: motivating technology-mediated social participation. AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction, 1(1), pp. 16

• "Sharing alone is a way of interacting in social media, but whether sharing leads users to want to converse or even build relationships with each other depends on the functional objective of the social media platform."

     ——Kietzman, J. H., Hermkens, K., McCarthy, I. P., & Silvestre, B. S. (2011). Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media. Business Horizons, 54(3), 245

When I came across with these descriptions, I wondered why such an oxymoron could be possible. How do people really feel while they are networking online? And more importantly, how will they feel after that?

With new technology being released everyday and adverts bombarding us with the need to be able to do more with less, multitasking, and multhiple-use devices, Sherry Turkle worries that we may gradually lose serenity and joy while being alone, thinking in depth, or communicating with a friend face to face. As for me, I do prefer text messages to voice calls or meetings in person due to the sense of control that Turkle mentioned. There will be hardly anything out of expectations if you have a text-based communication. We will never be embarrassed and can always maintain a perfect image of ourselves though it may cost us more energy and time to do so, e.g. check a post over and over again before sending it to show a feeling of relax...(enjoy the funny video below ^-^ ).

Taking Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and etc. as mediators for our communication, we defamiliarize this most common daily process and regard it seriously as a job that should be done. When every post and communication is given as a formal presentation, we are certainly more likely to gain a sense of so-called "self-esteem", which is also suggested by Amy L. Gonzales's research.

However, this short-term satisfaction is accompanied by intermittent anxiety in the long run. Being addicted to a made-perfect self in the virtual world, we might well be more afraid of appearing clumsy in the flesh. The underlying logic here is that I love my identity online so that I love those people who know me as my identity online, and therefore I would rather spend more time with those loved ones who might also enjoy being admired of their online identities by my online identity. In brief, we are obsessed with the delicate and "perfect" world we designed while gradually shrink from the "imperfect" world we live.

It sounds horrible, but is it really a problem? We should admit that human beings change over time. What looks weird today might be commonplace in the future. Is it possible that one day everyone just live as a separate unit surrounding by different equipment? Perhaps, ties among people provided through those devices, whether strong or weak, are already adequate for an individual. That humans are social animals can also be a fallible hypothesis.

Once we lived close to each other because we had to fight against the cruel environment with joint efforts. After that period of time, our domain were extended from a village to a country, from a state to around the world. Despite that it was unimaginable that someone would work tens of thousand kilometers away from his/her home hundreds of years ago, it is trivia nowadays. It was the first time that the blood tie was let go. Moreover, increasing number of people tend to be single, which reveals to some extent that the tie of marriage is let go as well. Simply, the fact is we become more and more independent. As more tasks can be handled by only one person with the assist of high-tech machines, there are reasons to believe that humans may deliberately try to get rid of those heavy relationships when they feel that they are powerful enough to face the world.

Don't be so worried. It is just the trajectory of human history. Instead of withdrawing back from industrial age to agricultural age, we entering the age of electricity. There is no doubt that we lose a lot of unsophisticated and beautiful things during that progress, but humans hate to walk backwards and thus they are expenses that we should take in order to step forward to the next era, whether good or not.