CPRN 2020: Culture and Social Boundaries Under Conditions of "Social Distancing"

The CPRN 2020 Online Conference will focus on digital privacy challenges while focusing on four themes:

- Conseptualizing Privacy and Capturing its Changing Nature Across Cultures
- The Challenge of Measuring Privacy Across Cultural and Political Context
- Cultural and Social Boundries Under Conditions of "Social Distancing"
- Privacy After Pandemic: Emerging Directions in Privacy Research

For each theme, we have prepared questions and challenges that we want to discuss with privacy scholars from around the world in a series of two-hour online live sessions as well as asynchronously on our site. For more information about CPRN 2020, Click here. 
To the conference website, Click here.

In the third session we will discuss: Cultural and social boundaries under conditions of “social distancing”

As of March 2020, the Corona pandemic forced over 20% of the world population into a lockdown either due to quarantine or calls for “social distancing.” As a result many social, professional, political, and economic activities that were previously conducted in third places, such as schools, offices, and public buildings, are now conducted from home, whereas municipal, regional or national governments enforce limitations of movement or curfews of various nature and force. Such rapid and massive change in the mode of social interaction requires an immediate renegotiation of boundaries between the public and the private, the professional and the domestic, and between the distant and the intimate. People may develop new practices of mediated communication and adjust their thinking about media, information, and communication technologies as they are forced into their rapid adoption. This session will focus on a series of emerging questions, such as:

1. What does the context of “social distancing” produce in terms of perceptions and practices of use of media, information, and communication technologies?

2. How do people deal with the contrast/tension between a situation of social isolation and the growing need to negotiate various boundaries (cultural, social, private, professional…)?

3. What may those redrawn boundaries look like? How persistent do we expect this arrangement to be over time?

4. How are digital media affordances leveraged to negotiate privacy in this context ?

5. How do actors (the “locked down”, providers of communication solutions, regulators) position themselves in this context ? How do they adapt, profit from, or reinforce boundary work ?

6. What does communicating under “social distancing” do to perceptions of context of information flows and how does it alter the privacy calculus of individuals?