Analysis of a Facebook Freakout: Rhetoric of Agency in the Places Privacy Debate
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Abstract
New technologies often generate fear regarding privacy threats, and social
networking sites like Face book have lately experienced the brunt of the criticism.
Face book users, even as they post greater amounts of information online, express
concern over privacy violations. This paradox suggests that the issue is more
complex than the private/public dichotomy and that the rhetoric used during these
protests could yield insights regarding the competing worldviews expressed in a
privacy debate. My paper examines discourse by the ACLU and Face book at the time
the controversial Facebook Places application came out. I use cluster criticism to
show how the two rhetors position themselves, each other, Face book users, and
users' friends in terms of the degree of control each ;:igent is portrayed as having. My
findings suggest that appealing to users' agency will be a key persuasive strategy as
concerns over social networking privacy violations increase, and I comment on how
sentence structure in corporate discourse can be used to enhance or detract from
users' sense of agency when using social networking sites.