What Happens Next? Using the Story Completion Method to Surface the Affects and Materialities of Digital Privacy Dilemmas

Ash Watson and Deborah Lupton
Additional contact information
Ash Watson: UNSW Sydney, Australia
Deborah Lupton: UNSW Sydney, Australia

Sociological Research Online, 2022, vol. 27, issue 3, 690-706

Abstract: People’s ideas and practices concerning their personal data and digital privacy have received growing attention in social inquiry. In this article, we discuss findings from a study that adopted the story completion method together with a theoretical perspective building on feminist materialism to explore how people make sense of and respond to digital privacy dilemmas. The Digital Privacy Story Completion Project presented participants with a set of four story prompts (‘stems’) for them to complete. Each introduced a fictional character facing a privacy dilemma related to personal data generated from their online interactions or app use. Our analysis surfaces how privacy is imagined as simultaneously personal and social, redolent with affective intensities, and framed through relational connections of human and nonhuman agents. While the story stems involved scenarios using digital technologies, participants’ stories extended beyond the technological. These stories offer insight into why and how the potential for and meaning of digital privacy unfolds into more-than-digital worlds.

Keywords: affect; critical data studies; digital privacy; digital sociology; personal data; sociomaterialism; story completion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13607804221084343 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:socres:v:27:y:2022:i:3:p:690-706

DOI: 10.1177/13607804221084343

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Sociological Research Online
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().