Islands of Privacy

It Seems like everyone worries about privacy these days, especially online. But how we use the Internet is only a subset of the ways we work to achieve privacy in our everyday lives. Islands of Privacy gives us an intimate view into the full range of ordinary people's sometimes extraordinary efforts to preserve the border between themselves and the rest of the world. Running the gamut from the hilarious to the disturbing, Christena Nippert-Eng tours the myriad arenas where privacy battles are fought, lost, and won. She explores how we manage our secrets, the contents of our wallets and purses, our phone calls and email, and interactions along the perimeters of our homes. She discovers that we all practice the art of selective concealment and disclosure, an important balancing act that governs a surprisingly wide range of behavior. Violations of privacy and anxiety about its future also come under Nippert-Eng's microscope as she crafts a compelling argument that successfully managing privacy is critical for successfully maintaining our relationships with each other and our selves.

"Looking for life in all the right places, Nippert-Eng takes us to the beach, the purse, and the email account. Through systematic and empathetic investigation, she shows how privacy and exposure to others are strategic accomplishments that vary over moments of the day, social context, and items at hand. The result is a unique substantive and methodological contribution from one of sociology's most inventive field workers."

Harvey Molotch, New York University

"This is a most welcome contribution to the study of social interaction and interpersonal relations. Nippert-Eng combines a sophisticated theoretical mind and a remarkably astute empirical eye, demonstrating in numerous dazzling observations that, far from being trivial, everyday life provides a key to some of the most fundamental questions sociologists have been asking about the human condition. Islands of Privacy exhibits the kind of scholarship that, following in the intellectual footsteps of Erving Goffman, highlights the mundane, which is usually taken for granted and thereby ignored by most sociologists."

Eviatar Zerubavel, Rutgers University

"This is a major work of original research, depicting the processes, exchanges, and concerns involved in the ongoing social negotiation of this thing we call `privacy.' The strength of Nippert-Eng's closely detailed approach is that it allows us to see that privacy is a complicated value subject to constant change, pressure, defense, and negation. The book is also elegantly written---in admirable, Studs Terkel fashion, she is able to get people to tell some great stories about the things that interest us all."

John Gilliom, Ohio University

Christena Nippert-Eng is associate professor of sociology and associate chair of the Department of Social Sciences at the Illinois Institute of Technology. She is the author of Home and Work: Negotiating Boundaries through Everyday Life.

The University of Chicago Press