ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses historical and ongoing usage and treatment of ‘digital privacy’ in Communication Studies. Section 1 traces out some of the key historical, empirical, conceptual, theoretical, and philosophical contours of digital privacy. It emphasizes how these contours shift in response to ongoing technological change, bringing with it considerable conceptual tension to researchers in our field. As this section demonstrates, overcoming these challenges and tensions necessitates scholastic moves towards interdisciplinarity as a means of comprehending, critiquing, and enriching our understandings of digital privacy altogether. The section also demonstrates that the legacy of interdisciplinarity around digital privacy has resulted in the normalization of highly differentiated yet normative intellectual tendencies when dealing with the concept itself. Section 2 thus looks towards four emerging and ongoing industrial and intellectual trends (artificial intelligence, hacking and hacktivism, privacy policy and privacy law, and noise) to demonstrate how Communication Studies scholarship continues to normatively diagnose and prescribe digital privacy in response to them. The section also raises questions along the way to draw attention to how intellectual tendencies in our field are normalizing, and to thus draw attention to how they may be used as a basis for igniting much needed theoretical work on digital privacy – as discussed in Section 3.
