The Internet and Privatism: Reconstructing the Monitor Space

Abstract

The question of the relationship between the Internet and privatism was presented in Uprising: The Internet’s Unintended Consequences (2011a) as an aspect of contemporary life that requires detailed research and theory. In an effort to offer more analysis around the theory of privatism in an interdisciplinary context this paper draws on Sam Bass Warner’s 1968 study The Private City: Philadelphia in three periods of its growth, which traced the emergence of privatism as a uniquely American phenomenon. Drawing on Warner’s material, this paper argues that privatism theory can be considered the prevailing new modality of meaning making in the Internet era, generated through commercial imperatives from the American center and circulating outwards like so many waves in the global pool. It combines the technical structures that facilitate the flow of the Internet’s unregulated digital media together with the agency it offers users to engage with deep value flows that have constructed ideology with a United States (American) default. Privatism is elaborated within this context using critical theory to elaborate on the ideology inherent in the new meaning landscape that impact constructions of the self through “cumulative internalisation.” Using approaches associated with cultural and media studies, the paper traces the way the Internet has influenced the shift in the culture towards values associated with the confluence of ideas around the private, best described by privatism.