Ellen Beldner

Undergraduate honors thesis, Carnegie Mellon Univ., 2000.

PDF of the full paper: http://ellenbeldner.info/portfolio/beldner.RhetoricOfPrivacy.pdf

Modern Americans have three primary understandings of privacy or private. First, we have the notion that privacy indicates civic status: a private home is a building not open to general members of the community. Second, we understand privacy to mean secrecy: what a person seeks to preserve as private is something that she sequesters from others’ view. Finally, we use privacy to indicate some level of personal autonomy, as with our notion that the “right to privacy” protects our ability to choose particular types of medical care without interference from political authorities.

The second and third senses of privacy today represent very powerful cultural notions. For this reason each is rhetorically appropriated in unusual situations; additionally, the rise of the computer culture in the 1990s has made the notion of privacy-as-secrecy almost compete with the notion of a “right to privacy.” Both of these stages of discourse compete for use of the word privacy, and as a result, both discourses are clouded. Referring to the “right to privacy” as the “right to self-determination” is a more precise way to discuss that right and thereby clarify both debates.