A quarter into the twenty-first century, as digital technologies have become ubiquitous in everyday life across many contexts, we find it particularly pressing to study public/private boundaries. In the past few decades, digital technologies have expanded the discourse on private and public as many aspects of our lives are shared voluntarily, and a huge pool of personal data has involuntarily become accessible for companies and states – not entirely public but no longer private. This has sparked debate about the interfaces of public and private, and where boundaries ought to be drawn in a digital day and age. We argue that public/private boundaries are always political, and their understandings shaped by normative evaluations of differently situated actors at a given moment. In our focus on digital social life across the public/private in this introduction and collection taken together, we ask: Does it matter if there is a distinction or not, and for whom? To what extent is the current view on public/private in a digitalised context reflective of the sociocultural, emotional, historical, and political-economic conditions in which this particular view is shaped?
The interrelationship between public and private spheres has been discussed for millennia. Starting with Aristotle, who established the separation between the household and polis around 350 BCE, liberal political thinkers like John Locke introduced the popular distinction between public authority and private freedom in the late 1600s (Warner 2002). Immanuel Kant ([1781] 2008) developed his view of public and private reason in the 1780s. In the 1950s, Hannah Arendt ([1958] 2018) viewed the public as a premise for private freedom, and Jürgen Habermas ([1962] 1992) presented the notion of modernity being structured by public spheres in the 1960s. Feminist scholars, including Michelle Rosaldo (1980), launched their important criticism of the gendering of public and private spheres in the 1980s, followed by decolonial scholars such as Aníbal Quijano (2000) who pointed to the utopian potential of an alternative non-state public beyond the capitalist/socialist Eurocentric notions of private and public. A non-state public – as opposed to the equivalence of state and public in liberal and socialist ideology – consists in a social private alternative to personal or commercial property.
Whether or not the terms ‘public’ and ‘private’ have been used explicitly, ethnographers have engaged with different practices and politics associated with these spheres for decades, including by paying attention to transparency, opacity and secrecy, exposure and display, closeness and intimacy, and boundary-making between certain domains of social practice, whether relational, spatial, or decisional – and across intersecting identities (e.g., Barth 1975; González 2011; Handelman 1990; Herzfeld 2009; Manderson et al. 2015; Meyer 2006; Rosaldo 1980; Waltorp 2013, 2020). As these works demonstrate, ideas, and practices of access as well as exclusion from public and private spheres may be determined by ideologies, norms, and values as well as economic and political structures, gendered at the core. The public and private are thus not merely any given distinction; they both reflect and (re)produce social differentiation. Moreover, as Dena Goodman (1992) points out, the public and private are not simple oppositions or binaries. Most phenomena are private in one sense and public in another, and how the distinction is made is informative in and of itself. In many cases, we can observe empirically how the public and private are understood as opposing spheres, as if they constituted different social worlds organised around contrasting and incompatible moral principles, including individual/community, male/female, work/home, rationality/sentiments, money/love, and self-interest/group welfare. As Susan Gal (2007: 25) argues, the way this opposition is ascribed, made, and felt may give us useful insight into both the cultural, religious, and political dynamics at play in any given context (see also Ortner 1972). We argue that this makes situated public/private relationships fruitful to study anthropologically at a moment where digital sociality and the technological infrastructures undergirding it are refiguring these relationships.
We contend that the ubiquitous digital dimension of social life on both a local and global scale has implications for variously situated people's access to a number of goods, whether it be privacy, visibility in a public space, economic advantages, social relationships, or political influence. Digital technologies have become an integrated part of commercial activity where cookies catalogue internet users’ behaviour, making it possible for advertisers to profile their target customers in new ways.1 The invasive nature of this form of tracking has generated significant resistance and new awareness of boundaries between ‘public’ information and ‘private’ life. This is visible in institutional responses such as the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Protection of Personal Information Africa (PoPIA). The baseline of these laws is that data processing is only lawful if the individual's consent is obtained. However, accessing many services depends on the person consenting to use the application (app) on the provider's terms; otherwise, one will be excluded from its services. This demonstrates how access to ‘private’ life may be restricted and, at any rate, very opaque in the digital age. The work of algorithms and the data they are trained on likewise augments existing inequality (Benjamin 2019; Birhane 2022; Buolamwini and Gebru 2018; Lomborg 2022; Waltorp et al. 2022). This has made both the European Union and United States rapidly introduce comprehensive laws to govern its use following the arrival of the virally popular ChatGPT in 2022–2023 (European Parliament 2023; Jeans 2023). From another vantage point, we see how digital technologies have enabled people to reach out, connect, and mobilise across previous social, cultural, economic, and geographic boundaries (e.g., Bratrud 2024a; Bräuchler and Postill 2010; Lingel 2017; Nemer 2022; Norman et al. 2024; Waltorp and Sadat Ben Haddou 2023), also crossing boundaries of gendered public/private spaces in unexpected ways, as in the case of Turkish housewives gaining public fame and viral popularity livestreaming on their YouTube channels from within the private home (Bagdogan 2023).
In this collection, we focus particularly on the digitalisation of the Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, which are often considered as a coherent group of countries despite their differences. They are geographically proximate to each other, have an intertwined history, similar languages (with the exception of Finland), and are known for their common social politics – the social-democratic project known as the ‘Nordic Model’. This model implies socioeconomic policies characterised by a relatively high tax load, which funds a welfare state providing universal welfare independent of citizens’ backgrounds and resources. Many citizens in the Nordics find that this model benefits them and therefore place significant trust in their public sector, a trust public authorities also value and wish to maintain (Winthereik et al. 2024: 10). This trust is evident in the public's attitudes towards the increased use of digital technologies, including drones. For instance, if the state is involved, there is often a greater willingness and baseline of trust that such potentially intrusive technologies will be used responsibly, for the common good, and with the public interest in mind, as opposed to usage by corporations or private persons (Bajde et al. 2017; Waltorp and Bruun 2022).
Importantly, the Nordic countries harbour ambitions to be at the global forefront of the digitalisation of public services and currently rank among the most digitalised in the world. They score high in broadband connectivity, internet use, business digitalisation, digitalisation of education and health services, and general digital skills (European Commission 2022). This high level of digital literacy makes many people in the Nordics no longer think twice about having online consultations with their GP, conducting banking services from their phone, googling restaurant reviews on the go, organising one's social life through a number of apps, and working remotely from a mountain cabin, harking back to the point on trust (see Bratrud 2024b; Broch et al. 2024; Pink et al. 2021). We therefore argue that the Nordics provide a relevant ethnographic setting to investigate questions around the ways digitalisation reconfigures boundaries between the public and the private.
Moreover, we argue that we need new conceptual tools to understand the embeddedness of digital technologies in social life. We also need to move beyond conceptualising Northern Europe and the United States as either front-runners or unmarked and universal when empirically investigating reconfigured versions of (digital–physical) public and private lives in these regions. Unlike other traditions of knowledge, Ramón Grosfoguel (2009: 11) holds that ‘the western is a point of view that does not assume itself a point of view’. As scholars working in the South Pacific and South Africa, respectively, as well as in Europe, we seek to assume the Nordic as a point of view, ‘provincializing Europe’ (Chakrabarty 2008) to push against Euro-American techno-determinist dominant narratives of Silicon Valley. Paying attention to the Nordics as a region affords comparatively engaging differences and similarities of digital sociality in grounded ways.
Anthropologists have emphasised how digital technologies obtain their importance and effect through the dynamic interplay of their function, designed affordances, and the meaning and significance people attach to them (see Gibson 1979; Waltorp 2018, 2020). This also means that the technologies themselves are shaped by the way people live, think, and interact with and through them (Broch et al. 2024; Walter 2022). We therefore hold that it is crucial to examine how social principles, cultural norms, and values shape and are themselves shaped by digital devices and dimensions. This includes values perceived to be shifting from common/public to individualistic/market-driven/private, a modernity depending on a distinction between the secular (as public) and religion (as private) (Bäckström 2014), or how underlying cultural boundaries between the public and private are key to dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, as theorised by influential Norwegian anthropologist Marianne Gullestad (1984, 1989, 1992; see also Bruun et al. 2011; Lien et al. 2001; Loftsdóttir 2011, 2012). However, Gullestad's foundational theorisation of public and private has its point of departure in a world before mobile phones and the internet. These technological changes have had a significant impact on sociocultural and political life to the extent that omitting them from ethnographic studies today often constitutes a serious blind spot (Bluteau 2019: 276; Broch et al. 2024; Winthereik et al. 2024). With the collection's focus on digital sociality, we thus add another dimension to the debates on public/private dynamics in the Nordics and contribute to – and challenge – existing knowledge about social life in the region more generally. While the collection's ethnographic focus is on the Nordics, the theme's global relevance is addressed in all the articles. The aim is thus to make the collection a reference work for understanding the complex negotiation of porous public/private boundaries or interfaces in an increasingly digitalised world.
Anthropological Attention to Digital Technologies as Figure-Ground Reversals
When we speak of digital technologies, we refer to both software, hardware, and the underlying infrastructure of fibreoptic cables, data centres, and servers that generate, create, store, or process data – that is, information converted into binary digital form. However, in this collection the ethnographic attention centres on the technologies when they are used by people as part of, and shaping, their social or work life. This usage is investigated by Cecilia G. Salinas, Gudrun Rudningen, and Tom Bratrud; interpellated as part of the nation during COVID-19, as explored by Goda Cicėnaitė and Kristín Loftsdóttir; used to facilitate academic ritual during COVID-19, as discussed by Sonja Trifuljesko and Tuuka Lehtiniemi; and as part of infrastructural systems like ‘smart’ water storage, as examined by Jonas Falzarano Jessen. Beyond Jessen's contribution, the infrastructural undergirding is not foregrounded as such, and we point to studies by colleagues across anthropology, geography, media studies, and STS that interrogate this scale, such as the mapping of fibreoptic cable networks and the political economy of who owns this new architecture for intimate, social, and political life, and how (and by whom) it is governed (Flensburg and Lai 2024), how controversies are mapped (Venturini and Munk 2021), how platformisation is the focus (van Dijck et al 2018), and how the life cycle of data works (Douglas-Jones et al. 2021). In this collection, the social interfacing with the screens of digital technologies is our central figure (Geismar and Knox 2021), while the underlying platform architecture and infrastructure is less in focus.
At the same time as we make the digital the figure and focus area, as they play a pivotal role in shaping societal phenomena, a core argument of the collection is that a strictly media-centric approach to digitalisation risks overlooking the everyday notions and practices of sociality that underpin people's entanglement with digital technologies and (re-)shape public/private boundaries. We thus also let the digital technologies themselves recede into the background to become ‘ground’ to people's sociality as an alternative ‘figure’ and focus area, including their actions, feelings, and affect as they go about their everyday lives. To better grasp the motivations behind, and the implications of, the interplay between people and digital technologies, this collection thus explores how digital practices are embedded in, and embed, social and material life in some of the world's most digitalised contexts. Figure-ground reversals occur throughout and to various degrees in all the individual chapters.
Aristotle was the first to have the distinction between public/private attributed to him, while also given credit for the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This insight has been developed by many scholars, including Roy Wagner in his analyses of life among the Barok of Papua New Guinea, which he describes as centred on meaningful imagery and the concept of figure-ground reversal. Wagner posits that the figure-ground reversal ‘does not simply negate, it consummates its denial by demonstrating also that the inversion makes as much sense as the order it inverts [ . . . ] for it elicits a change of perspective within the viewer – an image of transformation formed by the transformation of an image’ (Wagner [1987] 2012: 541–542; see also Waltorp 2020). The figure-ground reversal thus denotes alternating perceptions, depending on shifting interpretations of which parts of ‘the image’ represent the ‘figure’ and which represent the (back)‘ground’.
To us, the figure-ground reversal is the promise of an anthropological attention that is neither technocentric nor oblivious to the ubiquitous nature of digital technologies and digitally mediated, digitally enabled, and digitally augmented sociality – what we here refer to as ‘digital sociality’. The figure-ground reversal works here as an analytical device to address both the digital and the social aspects of digital sociality as two intertwined parts of a whole. It also draws attention to the new figurations of public/private that digital technologies set in motion. What is visible in one sphere may be invisible in the other, although porous boundaries exist between them. For instance, the absence of a ‘public’ offline sphere does not mean it is not present in more ‘private’ spheres, such as on social media, which can significantly affect people's perception of self, other, and their environment.
With our focus on figure-ground reversal, we ask a series of interrelated questions: What kinds of ideas and opinions, underpinned by specific norms, values, and worldviews, are now seeping into the public sphere because of the technology – in some instances spreading virally with hashtag activism and ground-level mobilisation, intersecting in new ways during wars and conflict (Norman et al. 2024; Waltorp and Sadat Ben Haddou 2023)? To what extent are the boundaries for public display of the body and intimate life stories changing, and what are the consequences (see also Salinas 2023)? To what extent do social media posts follow previous cultural norms and social conventions, for instance along gender lines, and to what extent are they part of new sociocultural forms (e.g., #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, and #RhodesMustFall)? How is it changing our environment and ways of governing? And to what extent do apps that demonstrate people's movements and successes map onto physical as well as social landscapes, as Bratrud demonstrates in his article? Before we explore how this collection addresses these questions, we will situate the public and private within the body of scholarship that has inspired the volume.
Situating the Public and Private
As Michael Warner (2002: 28, 59) points out, ‘public’ and ‘private’ are terms with a complex history. Most major cultural change, he argues, from Christianity to Liberalism to printing to Western psychology, have left new sedimentary layers in the meaning of the public and private in the places and people they have influenced. For instance, Christianity introduced an emphasis on the eternal private person, and from some perspectives, devalued the ‘public’ world around them (Robbins 2004). Print culture gave us publications that scaled up networks for communicating information and points of view (Anderson 2006; Habermas [1962] 1992). Liberalism's individualism emphasised the private as an intrinsic value rather than merely a privation of publicness (Warner 2002: 39). Western psychology, meanwhile, gave us a new sense of the private person as largely decontextualised, self-possessive, and singularly responsible for itself and its thoughts, emotions, and behaviour (Ingle 2021). To what extent may we say that digital technology – with its social media platforms, ubiquitous cookies, AI, and so on – adds as well as detracts and disturbs layers of meaning and significance to the public and private? Empirical studies are pivotal to rigorously examine these questions and contribute to democratic debates on how we want to shape our environment now and in the future.
In Western philosophical tradition and social theory, the boundary between the public and private has typically been seen as spatially distinct, where moving from one to the other involves crossing a barrier or making a transition. The background for this spatial distinction, which is also a social distinction, can be traced back to Europe's major cities in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as described in detail by Habermas – a discussion we will return to in the next section. A popular understanding is that, during this period, men moved into the public domain to debate politics, while women were relegated to the private indoors, with a stronger responsibility and devotion to assumedly (apolitical) domestic life. If there was no concept or idea of the ‘private’ or ‘public’ before, popular accounts suggest that the closing of homes’ doors to the ‘public’ during this period and in this part of the world, focusing on ‘private’ family life, helped make the distinction relevant (Nauman and Vogt 2022: 5).
However, in practice, public and private realms are not clearly demarcated as distinct zones, whether architecturally, ideologically, socially, or experientially (Warner 2002: 26). As Sari Nauman and Helle Vogt (2022: 5–6) point out, even during the period when the public/private distinction was established, the home was never as private as it was imagined to be. Small spaces were often shared by many, and it was normal to sublet apartments to travellers and newcomers, ensuring a steady flow of outsiders into the home. Additionally, servants and maids frequently ran errands, further blurring the public/private boundary. ‘Private’ homes were thus still ‘public’ spaces open to guests, where political debate as well as commercial activities took place. Moreover, public spaces were not wholly public nor exclusively male. While some upper- and upper-middle-class women may have preferred to or been confined to staying at home, common people were dependent on moving between spaces – conducting business, shopping, or engaging in social relationships outside of one's home (see also van den Heuvel 2019). Open ‘public’ spaces were therefore accessible to more groups than previously assumed, though the level of access varied.
Also in current contexts, the boundary between public and private remains diffuse and contradictory. Private life can be discussed publicly, public events can hold private meanings for different persons; one may listen to a public podcast when relaxing alone, and a public entry on social media may be created from a private bathroom. Thus, delineating where the public starts and the private ends is not straightforward, making generalisation difficult. However, the elusiveness of the private/public as concepts should be taken as an analytical opportunity rather than a limitation as it allows us to study concepts, spheres, and ideas as they take on different meanings in various contexts, with their boundaries negotiated at particular moments (Nauman and Vogt 2022: 1). We draw inspiration from Noortje Marres, who follows John Dewey in proposing that a public emerges around a shared interest sparked by issues of concern (Marres 2004), and from Warner (2002: 66), who views the public as a kind of specified ‘social totality’ that may be the nation, the city, the state, or another community thought to include everyone within the relevant field. With these definitions, we acknowledge that there might be different publics available to different actors, accessible simultaneously and at various levels, including the family, the neighbourhood, the state, or a global community (see Nauman and Vogt 2022: 6).
Conversely, we see the private as those places, practices, decisions, information, feelings, or other aspects of life from which the person wishes to exclude others, have rights to exclude others, or is socially expected to do so. A central feature of the private is thus control over access to one's person and information about them (Bruun 2021; Gavison 1980; Solove 2004). This can be from the perspective of the person themselves or that of others who expect to be shielded from what they perceive as another person's private matters. The private can thus be about privilege in that it can denote intimacy, trust, and personal identity, but it can also be about exclusion and silencing. Similarly, public domains can be about access to community, being heard, and participation – voluntary as well as involuntary (see Manderson et al. 2015: 185). Fundamentally, we relate to the public/private as a dichotomy, albeit an uneasy one, as people speak about the ‘public’ and ‘private’ as categories that are relevant to them. One example is Sonja Trifuljesko and Tuukka Lehtiniemi's article on the ambivalent re-configuration of private and public socialities during the COVID-19 pandemic when doctoral defences in Finland, an important rite of passage, were moved online. When an important ritual, which balances public/private examination, ceremony, and celebration, was remade, it felt less ‘proper’, not fulfilling its intended role. Consequently, it had to be changed as soon as circumstances permitted.
The public/private dichotomy also exists explicitly in data protection laws, prompting people to navigate it, as illustrated by Stine Lomborg (2022) in the context of workplace surveillance technologies, when applying for a loan (Ruckenstein and Trifuljesko 2022), and in numerous other aspects of everyday life involving digital technologies (Ruckenstein 2023). People may also experience public/private boundaries in their bodies, as an embodied habitus (Bourdieu 1984), which can evoke feelings of shame, guilt, and anxiety, but also excitement and liberation when breaching unwanted social norms in public. Salinas demonstrates this in her article on anger and online activism against racialised exclusion in Norway. Her work details how digital networking sites offer minoritised Norwegians new communicative practices, enabling new ways of expressing and regulating emotions and becoming tools for political mobilisation.
In examining the shifting boundaries of public and private, and how these boundaries are embodied, we find it useful to turn to Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of ‘fields’ and ‘habitus’ (1984). For Bourdieu, fields denote arenas in which people attempt to accumulate, exchange, and monopolise different kinds of resources or capital – social, economic, and cultural. The fusion of these resources creates symbolic capital. Bourdieu argues that fields are organised vertically and horizontally, meaning they do not strictly correspond to social class but may serve as autonomous spaces of social interaction. He advises us to always ask: ‘what is a social class?’ and not to assume its existence in any given context (Bourdieu 1987). The extent to which participants in a field can successfully use the resources they possess depends on the continuous adaptation of their ‘habitus’ – the person's deeply ingrained habits, skills, and dispositions formed by their (socio-cultural) milieu. This means that while one's actions are conditioned, they are not determined; how one plays the hand that is dealt remains open. A decade ago, Karen Waltorp, along with Ida Willig and Jannie Møller Hartley, utilised a Bourdieuian lens to address new media practices, asking how field theory approaches could help in understanding how culture is (prod)used via various digital platforms (Willig et al. 2015). Their work considered digital practices and sociality while addressing questions of power and cultural production. This framework for social life across social fields and the individual's habitus aids in relational thinking, moving from micro to macro levels and transcending well-known binaries. Jonas Falzarano Jessen's article on how Danish digital water solutions become commodified and scalable through narratives of a functional Danish public system exemplifies such processes. Through the storytelling of expatriate Danish water professionals, their digitally enabled ‘water diplomacy’ – as Jessen calls it – transcends conventional boundaries between public (institutions, rights) and private (companies, commercialisation, assets) in innovative ways and with significant implications.
The Politics of Public/Private Boundaries
In exploring the political dimensions of public/private boundaries in digital sociality, we find it useful to revisit Habermas's classic perspectives on public and private spheres. In his influential study The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere ([1962] 1992), Habermas notes that in medieval times, most European societies were under the power of a monarch, and there was no public sphere separate from state authority. However, through a number of cultural and social changes over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the monarch's monopoly over the public diminished, largely due to the rise of newspapers, novels, trade, coffeehouses, salons, and similar public contexts of sociability. These new spaces provided forums for citizens to discuss current affairs independently of official state institutions such as the court or palace, enabling them to learn more about happenings in other places and reflect on their own society and context. In theory, these new public spaces were democratic and open to anyone: as people began to discuss how the state should be run, private citizens started collectively making demands on the state, rather than being controlled by it as in the feudal system. This process birthed a new, politically significant public sphere, separated from the ruling noble classes.
However, although this public sphere opposed established public authority and acted as a civil society's sphere, it was still mainly accessible to the bourgeois through their literacy, social connections, and relevant knowledge. To what extent can we draw parallels and say that digital platforms, including social media, function as these coffeehouses and salons today? Are these platforms creating alternative spheres that challenge the authorities of the established public sphere (Møller Hartley et al. 2021; Willig et al. 2015)? If so, do these platforms include everyone, or are they mainly accessible to certain segments of previously silenced citizens, similar to the bourgeoisie in Habermas's medieval Europe? Goda Cicėnaitė and Kristín Loftsdóttir's article about Lithuanian migrants in Iceland discusses how digital platforms can generate belonging in a foreign society for members who are otherwise excluded in various ways. Nonetheless, the social boundaries of digital platforms may also replicate and amplify those in offline life, reinforcing existing dynamics of exclusion or creating new ones. As all our contributors demonstrate, it is therefore crucial to analyse the relationship between the technological tools people engage with and the social norms and dynamics that shape their use and effects.
Early media scholars explored the potentialities and inherent dangers of communication technologies for democratic societies (Dewey 1927; McLuhan 1962), and the role of personhood and subjectivity, as well as collective identity, has been an integral part of scholarship on the formation of publics and counter publics (Calhoun 1992). Contemporary feminist media scholars advance a feminist version of Marshall McLuhan's insight that ‘the medium is the message’, arguing that while McLuhan's theory provides a universalising conception of the technological as a structuring form of power, feminist critics can take it up to show how technologies alter and determine the social experiences of race, gender, class, and sexuality, which are always both situated and informed by geopolitics (Sharma and Singh 2022).
A decade ago, Waltorp (2013) suggested that digital technology enabled a ‘public sphere 2.0’ where people and groups, often situated outside the democratic conversation, could make their voices heard. Since then, more critique of the architecture of this digital ecology has emerged, including of its very unequal access and the fact that the power to govern it is in the hands of a few tech giants (Benjamin 2013; Waltorp et al 2023). In a similar vein, Tuva Beyer Broch and colleagues (2024) discuss how people in highly digitalised Norway are increasingly ‘blind’ to various forms of digital illiteracy, and how this affects citizens’ access to services meant to be equally available. These are all important perspectives as different social actors have varied access to relevant digital platforms and different vantage points for understanding their features, which consequently enable them to grasp information about what is happening, critically examine it, and respond to it (Debenport 2019). Another pertinent critique centres the environmental impact of the energy needed to keep this digital dimension of society running, affecting humans and nonhumans alike (Abram et al. 2022; Kambunga and Waltorp 2024; Waltorp et al. 2022).
In his discernment of the public sphere's historical transformations, Habermas argues that state interventionism has increased with the rise of the twentieth-century mass media, which politicians use to manipulate the public rather than involving them in critical discussion. The solution, he argues, is a need for societies to limit government secrecy and find new forms of universal interest that can unite the public (Habermas [1962] 1992: 235). In the collection, we query to which extent this perspective is relevant for the Nordic countries that consistently reign when it comes to government trust globally (see, e.g., Bendixsen et al. 2017; Vike 2018). To what extent is it precisely in Nordic citizens’ public trust that critical discussion is hampered? And in the digital age, to what extent may powerful tech companies, including Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft, rather than the state, or in tandem with the state, create new structures that disallow the public to unite in an open public space? To what extent can tech companies’ algorithms create a symmetrical mass culture that makes it easier for those in power to circulate their views, but harder for marginal voices to talk back, implying a ‘re-feudalisation of the public sphere’ (Warner 2002: 49–50)? Algorithmic systems and their uses have been shown to disproportionately negatively impact those at the margins of society while benefiting the most powerful, reproducing bias and inequality (Benjamin 2019; Birhane 2022; Buolamwini and Gebru 2018). In the next section, we discuss Nordic values, principles, and practices and argue for a close examination of local circumstances in detailing these questions and their implications for different groups and in diverse localities.
The Public/Private in Nordic Everyday Life Contexts
In the Nordic welfare states, there is a cultural assumption that the collective (and public) ought to be emphasised and that individual interests and goals should be subordinated (and confined to the private) (e.g., Bendixsen et al. 2017; Gullestad 1992; Vike 2018). This is an enduring view, even though the Nordic welfare states have gradually shrunk since their peak in the 1960s and 1970s (Bäckström 2014; Heffernan 2020). However, Halvard Vike (2018: 46) demonstrates that people in the Nordics still tend to prefer a high level of governmental regulation in their ‘private life’, including a higher level of taxation. This is because state support is still found to provide access to relevant economic benefits and public services. In spite of increasing privatisation and liberalist/neo-conservative notions that citizens enjoy more ‘private’ freedom in the absence of the ‘public’ state, the individual autonomy enabled by a strong public thus seems to be valued above the freedom from this public, in line with the view of Arendt ([1958] 2018).
Writing about Nordic construction of community, Finnish historian Henrik Stenius (1997: 167) argues that ‘the good life’ in the Nordic countries relates to the public as a life of conformity, of ‘having the same form’. This is a value system he traces to the Lutheran premodern culture of the Nordic countries. The Lutheran tradition, he holds, contains ideas of stability and continuity, and there is a unitary, indivisible social organisation with a unified set of moral norms. In a society without wealth of continental and feudal proportions, and where ‘nature makes survival the overwhelming life project’, making sure everybody contributes becomes the main principle of social organisation (Stenius 1997: 164). Conforming to equality by contributing to others’ sustenance is in this context a moral matter, and a matter of being cultured. We recognise these conformist mechanisms in the classic code of conduct Janteloven (Jante's Law), formulated by Danish-Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose in the satirical novel A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks from 1933. Here, Sandemose presents the unwritten social norm of many Nordic communities entailing that one must always put society over the individual and never boast about one's individual accomplishments and successes. The code of conduct and the mindset it evokes is often referred to in colloquial speech across the Nordic countries to denote a condescending attitude towards ego, individuality, and personal success that must be confined to one's private realm and not be demonstrated in public.
Gullestad (1984, 1992) has written extensively on the cultural premises of the public/private boundaries described by Stenius and Sandemose as ‘equality as sameness’, where people emphasise commonalities (in public) while differences are played down (and confined to the private). Gullestad points out that Nordic societies have never been homogenous, but the emphasis on sameness often makes people avoid those people who, for different reasons, are perceived as ‘too different’, creating ‘symbolic fences’ – social boundaries related to class and ethnicity that people easily become blind to because they mostly interact with people who are similar to themselves (Gullestad 2002: 47). This boundary-making has also been discussed in ethnographic studies from Denmark in the special issue of Social Analysis, The Concern for Sociality: Practicing Equality and Hierarchy in Denmark (Bruun et al. 2011), as well as for Iceland (Loftsdóttir 2011, 2012) and to some extent Sweden (Norman 2004).
In the collection, we explore the extent to which digital sociality may challenge the notions of similarity and conformity of Gullestad, Sandemose, and Stenius and reveal differences that are normally concealed. In this we are inspired by Gal (2005: 26) who suggests seeing any given public/private distinction as reflecting an ideology of differentiation. Gal argues that a main aspect of ideologies of differentiation is that particular qualities are supposed to be shared by the social image (aspects of personhood, moral attributes, etc.) and the linguistic image (aspects of style and interaction, etc.). Social images and linguistic images are tied together in a linkage that appear to be inherent. But can the social and linguistic images employed in digital sociality challenge existing ideologies of differentiation?
In her writings about the public/private, Gullestad also discusses the Nordic need for individuality, autonomy, and what her interlocutors refer to as ‘peace and quiet’. This is a very private space that denotes and justifies a legitimate withdrawal from social relations. There is a drawing of tighter social boundaries to reach a desired emotional state, to ‘find calm’, be in control, and ‘feel whole’ (Gullestad 1992: 140–143). In this sense, there is a projection of space onto personhood, and personhood onto space, and a notion that private space can also be located inside the bodies of persons. In a digitalised context, people may find ways to create a virtual room of one's own via digital platforms and the sociality one can build there, particularly when there is no physical private room to withdraw to (Waltorp 2020). However, there is always the possibility of interior oppositions, which in this case can be formulated as public and private selves (Gal 2005: 34). Invasion of one's space can thus be a violation of boundaries, an invasion of privacy, and be a source of anxiety as well as new possibility (see Miller 2011: 169; Ruckenstein 2023). Gudrun Rudningen addresses these questions in her article on how journalists in a Norwegian newspaper started establishing new boundaries around themselves in order to protect their notion of harmony and autonomy after the introduction of digital spaces at the editorial office that enabled colleagues to see each other's work in real time. Even though there were no physical walls in the office landscape nor virtual ‘walls’ in the digital tools they used, journalists found it important to protect both their physical and digital spaces by cultivating invisible fences around their craft in both spaces.
In the collection, we explore to what extent digital sociality may challenge public/private boundaries even within the person, as people move into and out of different social realms offline and online. What does it do to people's imaginations and experiences of public and private selves, and what are the implications? Several articles in the collection discuss how digital technologies may help destabilise previous fields that have kept social spheres and groups apart, both vertically and horizontally. One way to approach this is by engaging with discussions of social media's effect of ‘context collapse’ – that is, when online and offline social contexts can no longer be kept separate (e.g., Marwick and boyd 2011). Relevant here are the social possibilities Waltorp (2020) has previously pointed out, and which Tom Boellstorff (2021) argues characterises digital sociality, namely the possibility of being different versions of the self at different places at the same time. Grounded in ethnography of young Muslim women in Denmark and fusing the theories of Bourdieu, Marilyn Strathern and Roy Wagner, Waltorp calls this the ‘composite habitus’, showing how social media allow for multiple versions of the self through public and secret relationships locally and across long distances. The ubiquity of digital technology has highlighted anxieties of a perceived collapse of the public/private boundary as if privacy is a kind of natural condition threatened by online visibility (Miller et al. 2016: 188). However, engaging a figure-ground reversal as analytical device, the authors of this collection demonstrate in diverse ways how public/private boundaries may be managed in other and more ingenious ways than a context collapse may suggest. The most explicit example is the article by Tom Bratrud, which suggests the term ‘context control’, in opposition to both context collapse and context restoration, to describe how mountain athletes in Norway use social media to strategically navigate between private and public spheres with different norms, values, and expectations. By managing these boundaries in a way that makes certain information transpire while keeping other information restricted, his interlocutors achieve recognition and forge relationships across the spheres, mitigating pressures on their impression management.
Bearing in mind Bourdieu's meticulous observation over time in Algeria and Béarn, which gave close attention to the material and symbolic worlds that people inhabit, interact with, and are simultaneously shaped by, he would probably applaud careful attention to environment in the broadest sense, as we attempt in this collection. This includes an awareness of technological artefacts, with all their tactile qualities and symbolic relationships with users, such as the computer, the smartphone, and other digital devices (see Willig et al. 2015: 8–9).
Conclusion
We argue that digital technologies can bring about new shared worlds and help centre new critical voices, but also new privacies, intimacies, bodies, individualities, and citizenships. But in which ways? By engaging a figure-ground reversal approach, where we move between seeing the technology as figure on the social as ground, and the social as figure on the technology as ground, we argue that we can better grasp the motivations behind, and the implications of, the interplay between people and digital technologies. Moreover, we argue that engaging with notions and conceptualisations of public/private boundaries is a fruitful entry point, as these constructions go to the very heart of matters of inclusion/exclusion, individuality/commonality, and morality/immorality. As such, they can tell us a great deal about the sociocultural and political-economic dynamics at play in a given context and how they are negotiated, upheld, or altered in the digital age.
We find the Nordics to be a particularly useful ethnographic vantage point for investigating these issues, as everyday lives in the region are highly digitalised, and there are pronounced distinctions between the public/private across sociocultural and political life. With global digitalisation affecting differently situated people's access to various goods and spaces, we argue that the figure-ground-reversal as device, the attention to public/private boundaries, and the focus on the Nordics presented in this introduction carry significant comparative potential. This combination, we argue, allows us to understand digital technologies and sociality through the interplay of the technologies’ intended function and the meaning and significance that people attach to them – what emerges in the in-between space when one becomes ground and the other figure.
Acknowledgements
The special issue springs from the research project Private Lives: Embedding Sociality at Digital Kitchen-Tables, funded by Research Council Norway (Project number 303048). We would like to thank the Future Anthropologies Network of the European Association of Social Anthropologist (EASA) for making the conference panel preceding this special issue their preferred panel at the EASA conference in Belfast in 2021. We are grateful to Marianne Lien and Synnøve Bendixsen for their insightful engagement with the papers; Tuva Beyer Broch, Line Kryger Aagard, Jacinta Victoria Muende, Simone Felding and David Lowis for their great papers to the panel that will be published elsewhere; and everyone in the audience for their participation. Thank you to AJEC editors Jennifer R. Cash and Aleksandar Bošković, as well as outgoing editor Patrick Laviolette, for their fruitful engagement with the special issue, and Cecilia G. Salinas, Jonas F. Jessen, Sonja Trifuljesko, Tuukka Lehtiniemi, Gudrun Rudningen, Kristín Loftsdóttir, and Goda Cicėnaitė for their articles, which have made the special issue what it is.
Notes
See Otto and colleagues (2023) for an ethnographic study of how app developers grapple with this in terms of open vs. proprietary software and Breslin (2023) for how ethics and trust is (not) considered in the education of developers.
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