The pre-modern self in post-modern times: The rhetoric of privacy in the work of Walter J. Ong, S.J.1

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The Edward Snowden revelations of leaked National Security Agency documents in 2013 received considerable attention in the scholarly and popular media. More recently, Facebook and other social media sites have come under scrutiny for their role in the 2016 US elections. Surveys of attitudes consistently indicate that Americans fear identity theft and other problems arising from Internet use. Yet Americans consistently turn over their personal data to Google, Facebook and other large companies. An important 2015 study of Internet browsing habits showed that users, after an initial concern with privacy-enhancing technologies following the Snowden revelations, quickly returned to sports and celebrity gossip as loci of interest. This article teases out reasons for the apparent contradiction. It uses Walter J. Ong’s work, Norbert Elias’s study of manners, along with more recent scholarship on privacy, on the early book trade and on aspects of the early modern period to argue that the contemporary concept of privacy is historically contingent. Historical circumstances and the development of certain technologies encouraged the development of privacy and the self. Current circumstances and technologies are contributing to their decay. This article grows out of two preliminary addresses, one given at the 2016 meeting of the Media Ecology Association in Bologna and the other at a meeting of the Gonzaga University Socratic Club in 2018.