When I joined Gross Girls Club over a year ago, I immediately understood the group as a ‘fight club’ for women. The rules were simple: don’t apologize for being a gross girl, support your sisters, and don’t talk about Gross Girls Club. The club is a private group by invitation only, and the privacy of the group forms an unspoken social contract: users will refrain from speaking about Gross Girl’s posts outside of the club. This social contract plays a vital role by acting as a safety net for the group because posts can range on topics from abuse to drug addiction. The social contract encourages women to freely post about such issues without fear of the repercussions experienced in other areas of social media.
However, the social contract may perpetuate a false sense of security for private group users. A quote from Wend Chun caught my attention during our readings for this week. When discussing the publicly private aspects of new media, Chun states, “...this notion of new media as erosion depends on the prior acceptance of networks as fundamentally personal and private, a notion that depends on certain habits of privacy that often undermine the very privacy sought” (Chun 13). This quote resonated with me when I thought of the ‘publicness’ within private groups.
Posting to any network entails that the user present information to a public sphere. Unlike a diary that keeps that information within a private medium, most networks, especially social networks, necessitate users to post information that is circulated amongst other users even in private groups. If private groups require public posts, why do private group users still see these posts as private?
I think that the social contract of such groups gives rise to that false sense of security. Gross Girls Club provides an example of this problem. A few months ago, a woman had posted personal information about an abuser that could put her safety at risk. That information was then relayed by a user to an individual outside of the group. When information about her post began to circulate outside of the group, that woman’s safety was threatened by the very privacy she sought security in.
By posting within a group labeled as private, users assume that those posts are unable to be seen outside of that group. However, once those private thoughts or images are disseminated in a given network those posts have entered a public realm of discourse. The false ‘refuge of privacy’ that Chun discusses can be explained by social contracts within private groups. Social contracts are easily broken, and privacy is only maintained as far as the group’s users adhere to those contracts. Thus, the very idea of privacy is determined by public relations with others. To believe that privacy exists outside of those relations creates a false refuge that could have dangerous consequences in networked communities. Even my blog post, though preapproved by the Gross Girl’s admins and users, violates the false refuge of privacy that these types of communities create.
I want to make clear that I do not want to attack groups like Gross Girls. I believe these groups are important because they offer platform to vocalize problems in a community with little to no judgment. However, the very act of vocalizing needs to be brought into the center of attention. To vocalize within a community is the act of abandoning privacy, and as Chun states, “… we need to embrace the fundamentally nonpersonal nature of our network communications” ( Chun 13). I think that embracing the publicness of these communities would make these groups a safer place for all private group users.