Communication Privacy Management
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Communication privacy management (CPM) theory helps explain how people perceive the information they hold about themselves and whether they will disclose or protect it (Petronio, 2000, 2002). CPM explains why Celeste, for example, will boldly share her religious beliefs, whereas Eddie will keep his faith intensely private. CPM theory presumes that people believe they own their private information and need to set up boundaries to control the potential risk that may make them vulnerable (Petronio, 2004).
Ethics and You
Can you think of examples of unethical privacy management in a workplace? Have you experienced any examples of this yourself ? If so, how did you resolve the situation?
You want to share information in order to increase intimacy with your partner, but it may be risky to do so, and maintaining private information is a worthy goal in its own right.
Two key features of relationships are central to privacy management. First, privacy management can be affected by dialectical tensions such as openness versus closedness, discussed earlier in the chapter. You want to share information in order to increase intimacy with your partner, but it may be risky to do so, and maintaining private information is a worthy goal in its own right. Second, privacy management requires cultural, situational, and relational rules or expectations by which people must be willing to abide. For example, it would likely be considered impolite for you to ask your boss about his medical condition because that topic is far too private for a work context in many cultures, and you are unlikely to have that level of personal intimacy with your manager. Yet that type of disclosure is expected in close relationships (Derlega, Winstead, Mathews, & Braitman, 2008).
Technology and You
Do you post any personal information on social-networking sites? What kind of information are you willing to reveal? What kind of information do you consider too private to share in mediated contexts?
If there is a threat to your privacy boundaries (for example, your trusted friend told your secret to someone else), you experience boundary turbulence and must readjust your need for privacy against your need for self-disclosure and connection (Guerrero, Andersen, & Afifi, 2007; Theiss, Knobloch, Checton, & Magsamen-Conrad, 2009). Boundary turbulence occurs in mediated situations too. If you have personal information about someone else, do you have the right to post it on Facebook? What about inside jokes or pictures taken at a party—do you have the right to share them with others? Judgments can be made based on your “friends” on Facebook, so you can see how complex privacy management becomes in mediated situations (Walther, Van Der Heide, Kim, Westerman, & Tong, 2008).