Boundary porosity: The politics of digital visibility
Author(s): Thomas Olesen
Wednesday 14 | 13:40-14:00
Room: TP45
Session: Untangling the entangled processes of digitization and privatization
What do Cambridge Analytica, Instagram stories, and Bellingcat in common? In my view, they all illustrate a new degree of boundary porosity in contemporary societies. The adjective porous is often understood to suggest fragility; something that is porous is also easy to break. My use of the term is associated but emphasizes another property: permeability. Translated into a sociological concept, boundary porosity describes a situation where information about something or someone private, secret, or hidden travels from one domain to another with relative ease. When information travels in this way it becomes visible to others who do not “own” the information. This makes boundary porosity inherently political. In the very moment that someone’s information gets “out there”, it can be acted on, often with profound consequences for those have who lost or given it away. The paper tries to defend a strong claim: that the boundary porosity we see today is more widespread and consequential than at any other point in history and that this, at least partly, has to do with the effects of digitalization. If this is true, it has significant implications for how we should understand the character of our public spheres and, in extension, of our democracies.
I am obviously not the first to argue that modern and late modern societies are in one way or the other defined by visibility, permeability, and transparency (e.g., Brighenti, 2007; Han, 2015; Keane, 2019; Schudson, 2015; Thompson, 2005, 2011, 2020; Rosanvallon, 2008). What is missing in these otherwise congenial and insightful analyses are two things, in my view. First, they do not systematically tie their arguments to the concept of the boundary. In my view, such a move is theoretically productive because it allows us to connect visibility, permeability, and transparency to the wider sociological process of differentiation, which, essentially, is about boundaries and autonomy. More specifically, I argue that differentiation contains a duality, or even paradox, where autonomy and privacy is valued, but where we also insist that these conditions must never be absolute and outside of visibility. I develop this idea in the first main section of the paper. Second, I do not see in any of these works a full and systematic appraisal of the many levels at which boundary porosity is now operative. Boundary porosity, as I discuss it here, concerns the behaviour of collective actors such as states, organizations, and private companies as well as that of individuals. It also involves porosity that is both voluntary and involuntary. I build on this argument to propose a four-fold typology of digital boundary porosity in the paper’s second main section. In the final main section, I try to draw the threads together in order to assess the implications of digital boundary porosity for the public sphere and for democracy. What I will have to say here identifies an ambivalent situation with both democratic risks and advances.