Olivier Glassey: Mutual privacy and online distributed social identities

The massively popular use of social computing challenges the traditional perceptions and boundaries of privacy. Hybrid forms of private/public communication spaces in social networks are becoming new experimental fields for users as individuals and groups. Beyond the too simplistic diagnostic of the end of the private sphere, innovative individual or collective strategies emerge and alternatives attitudes are co-existing and sometimes conflicting online. The presentation will look at those different privacy sub-cultures in the making and explore tensions between individual presentation of the self and collective construction of social identity. It will link the issue of privacy to the roles of short and long term distributed memory (reputation, forgiveness) in order to understand the emergence of co-constructed private spheres in the context of social dynamics at play on and offline.