Private/Public Space of New Media
Today, we have a situation that the new media environment has reshaped our conception of reality while changing social spaces, modes of existence, and the functional mechanisms of the private sphere. In the space of new media, the boundary between privacy and publicity is redefined with the emergence of multiple network communities having become a subject of observation and evaluation, collective discussions, and even third party interventions. In the current situation, the privacy/publicity boundary can be defined both through the societal/the individual, and through such concepts as visible/invisible. The new media era sees the personification of online publicness, therefore the very sphere of private life gets consumed by the public sphere open both for being discussed and for being controlled by the government, market, and advertisement. The public sphere has fallen under the power of certain private/vested interests, which only transiently become common, coinciding with the interests of other groups, but not the public sphere. The ambivalent nature of new media, while based on personalisation and filtration, obviously determines the ambiguous and controversial relationship of the public and the private. Thus, the private not only reflects, but also represents the public, whereas the public implements privacy up to its inherent special intimate atmosphere and intonation. This fast-changing virtual reality requires the development of conceptual tools for analysing new content and forms of social and personal life, one of which is the relationship between publicity and privacy.