Privacy: A Short History

by David Vincent

A Short History provides a vital historical account of an increasingly stressed sphere of human interaction. At a time when the death of privacy is widely proclaimed, distinguished historian, David Vincent, describes the evolution of the concept and practice of privacy from the Middle Ages to the present controversy over digital communication and state surveillance provoked by the revelations of Edward Snowden. Deploying a range of vivid primary material, he discusses the management of private information in the context of housing, outdoor spaces, religious observance, reading, diaries and autobiographies, correspondence, neighbours, gossip, surveillance, the public sphere and the state. Key developments, such as the nineteenth-century celebration of the enclosed and intimate middle-class household, are placed in the context of long-term development. The book surveys and challenges the main currents in the extensive secondary literature on the subject. It seeks to strike a new balance between the built environment and world beyond the threshold, between written and face-to-face communication, between anonymity and familiarity in towns and cities, between religion and secular meditation, between the state and the private sphere and, above all, between intimacy and individualism. Ranging from the fourteenth century to the twenty-first, this book shows that the history of privacy has been an arena of contested choices, and not simply a progression towards a settled ideal. A Short History will be of interest to students and scholars of history, and all those interested in this topical subject.

Genres: History

194 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 29, 2016

About the author

Librarian note:
There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
This profile may contain books from multiple authors of this name.

Reviews

[Prbroom]

Not quite what I expected, but has a lot of interesting info,

[Kira · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely adored it. A short cultural history, mainly UK-centered, of privacy, which might sound quite niche if you're not a Snowden nerd like me, but there's so many interesting themes in here.
It's about communication: the physical spaces of communicating, where we go when we want to feel unobserved; but also the way different new forms of media - transforming the way we communicate - changed humanity's relationship with privacy and what we communicate.
It's also about the way living quarters and conditions changed throughout history and the influence that had on communication and relationships.
It's about changing infrastructure and society, and still it manages to always stick to its motif of showing up the tension between the public and the private sphere, spanning an insane amount of time from the Medieval Ages to the post-Snowden era 2015 and still staying relatively compact with under 150 pages of actual text plus a massively helpful list of further reading and notes, and that on-point-brevity makes me recommend this as a read for pleasure despite the relatively dense writing.
It was fascinating, well-researched and presented in a very pleasant way, just the right length, coherent in its themes and conclusions and just all in all very much what I wanted from it. Lovely.

[Vicki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good overview of the historical context of privacy. The first couple chapters on the Middle Ages are probably the best - the content gets more dense and murkier the further it goes on. It's also very Britain-centric, which isn't a minus, just something to keep in mind.

[Kegan Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of good information / historical context

[seldacansu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Breh breh breh. Yorumum bu kadar yani güzel öğretici demek.