The Unwanted Gaze
The Destruction of Privacy in America
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- 4,99 €
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- 4,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
As thinking, writing, and gossip increasingly take place in cyberspace, the part of our life that can be monitored and searched has vastly expanded. E-mail, even after it is deleted, becomes a permanent record that can be resurrected by employers or prosecutors at any point in the future. On the Internet, every website we visit, every store we browse in, every magazine we skim--and the amount of time we skim it--create electronic footprints that can be traced back to us, revealing detailed patterns about our tastes, preferences, and intimate thoughts.
In this pathbreaking book, Jeffrey Rosen explores the legal, technological, and cultural changes that have undermined our ability to control how much personal information about ourselves is communicated to others, and he proposes ways of reconstructing some of the zones of privacy that law and technology have been allowed to invade. In the eighteenth century, when the Bill of Rights was drafted, the spectacle of state agents breaking into a citizen's home and rummaging through his or her private diaries was considered the paradigm case of an unconstitutional search and seizure. But during the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, prosecutors were able to subpoena Monica Lewinsky's bookstore receipts and to retrieve unsent love letters from her home computer. And the sense of violation that Monica Lewinsky experienced is not unique. In a world in which everything that Americans read, write, and buy can be recorded and monitored in cyberspace, there is a growing danger that intimate personal information originally disclosed only to our friends and colleagues may be exposed to--and misinterpreted by--a less understanding audience of strangers.
Privacy is important, Rosen argues, because it protects us from being judged out of context in a world of short attention spans, a world in which isolated bits of intimate information can be confused with genuine knowledge. Rosen also examines the expansion of sexual-harassment law that has given employers an incentive to monitor our e-mail, Internet browsing habits, and office romances. And he suggests that some forms of offensive speech in the workplace--including the indignities allegedly suffered by Paula Jones and Anita Hill--are better conceived of as invasions of privacy than as examples of sex discrimination. Combining discussions of current events--from Kenneth Starr's tapes to DoubleClick's on-line profiles--with inno-vative legal and cultural analysis, The Unwanted Gaze offers a powerful challenge to Americans to be proactive in the face of new threats to privacy in the twenty-first century.
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Why were Paula Jones's lawyers "permitted to go on a fishing expedition into the President's sexual history?" Why was Kenneth Starr able to subpoena store records of books Monica Lewinsky had purchased? Why was he able to retrieve unsent love letters on her home computer? The erosion of privacy in American life, as demonstrated by the Clinton/Lewinsky case, is at the heart of this thoughtful, legally complex study by Rosen, a law professor and editor at the New Republic. Using the Clinton/Lewinsky and Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill affair, along with other case studies, he eloquently addresses why protecting individual privacy matters, what will be lost if we accede to its destruction, how the current state of affairs came to be and what can be done to recapture our lost privacy. Arguing that our collective loss of privacy has corrupted public discourse, the health of our workplaces and the well-being of our most intimate relationships, Rosen presents a strikingly original analysis of the legal, technological and social developments that have converged to justify invasive intrusions into our lives. Specifically, he argues that the archaic conceptual basis for privacy law and the extension of sexual harassment law to include "hostile workplaces" (where no explicit sexual advances occur) as a form of sexual discrimination are both blameworthy, and that the Internet is complicit. His critique of "hostile workplace" law is sure to stir up controversy. And many observers will think he's gone too far when he suggests, among other things, that what Clinton allegedly did to Paula Jones--exposing himself, making a crude remark--shouldn't be treated, legally, as sexual harassment. But Rosen's text is timely and will shape debate. And to his credit, he forgoes the traditional hand-wringing and offers creative and practical suggestions for a corrective course of action.
