Digital Age| Managing Secrecy

Authors

  • Clare Birchall King's College London

Keywords:

secrecy, transparency, visibility, visuality, privacyvity

Abstract

As many anthropologists and sociologists have long argued, understanding the meaning and place of secrets is central to an adequate representation of society. This article extends previous accounts of secrecy in social, governmental, and organizational settings to configure secrecy as one form of visibility management among others. Doing so helps to remove the secret from a post-Enlightenment value system that deems secrets bad and openness good. Once secrecy itself is seen as a neutral phenomenon, we can focus on the politicality or ethics of any particular distribution of the visible, sayable, and knowable. Alongside understanding the work secrecy performs in contemporary society, this article argues that we can also seek inspiration from the secret as a methodological tool and political tactic. Moving beyond the claim to privacy, a claim that has lost bite in this era of state and consumer dataveillance, a “right to opacity”—the right to not be transparent, legible, seen—might open up an experience of subjectivity and responsibility beyond the circumscribed demands of the current politico-technological management of visibilities.

Author Biography

Clare Birchall, King's College London

Dr Clare Birchall is a Senior Lecturer at King’s College London. She is the author of Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip (Berg, 2006) and co-editor of New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory (Edinburgh University Press, 2007). She has also edited special issues of the journals Theory, Culture and Society and Cultural Studies. Her most recent research is concerned with the relationship between secrecy and transparency in the digital age and she is part of an ESRC grant to fund a series of research seminars on such issues entitled ‘DATA - PSST! Debating and Assessing Transparency Arrangements - Privacy, Security, Surveillance, Trust’.Alongside more traditional scholarship, Birchall is involved with a number of digital projects. She is one of the editors for the online journalCulture Machine; an editorial board member and series co-editor for the Open Humanities Press; and part of the team behind the JISC-funded Living Books About Life series.

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Published

2016-01-05

Issue

Vol. 10 (2016)

Section

Special Sections

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