“It means facing things every day”: privacy arrangements around the use of digital media by young Brazilian women

Abstract

This text is constructed with the aim of understanding how the public-private relationship is experienced by women from the Brazilian popular classes, connected by the world wide web. The reflection will address how dimensions of honor, shame, recognition, feelings linked to gender and sexuality arrangements, as well as aspects related to the place of residence – which are part of these women’s life experiences – are important for the way these subjects negotiate their visibility and/or protect their network privacy. The research was conducted based on a digital ethnography, developed on social media platforms, as well as in the housing contexts of the research interlocutors, in the city of Rio de Janeiro. The proposal reflects on how privacy and what is said, hidden, shared, where it is said and how it is exposed results from a relational arrangement, which takes into account intersubjective as well as contextual elements. The text questions the thesis that affirms the end of privacy and the idea that exposure on the network is the result of either narcissistic personalities or the subject’s lack of knowledge about the interests of large technology corporations. Exposure on the network, on the contrary, shows an elaborate management of social capital online and the constitution of circuits of recognition among women.