Abstract

From an ethical and sociological perspective this article analyzes what it means when users upload pictures of children on social media forums. The paper argues that, under the conditions of Big Data and related surveillance practices, and following up on categories introduced by Hannah Arendt in "The Human Condition" (1958), what was once private has become part of the public sphere: people would increasingly become "publicly private," and act accordingly. The categorical blurring of what can be shown publicly and what should remain hidden in the private realm, and the consequences this has for digital practices such as exposing children by way of online pictures, may be a consequence of a new "relational", hive-orientated understanding of the self in online contexts which is a departure from a classically individual, autonomous understanding of the individual self. This poses an ethical problem inherent in many other practices of digitality as well.