METAMODERNISM AND THE QUESTION OF PRIVACY AND CONFIDENTIALITY IN THE DIGITAL AGE
In this paper, inquiry will be made into the extent to which individual freedom and social responsibility conflates or conflicts on issues surrounding privacy and confidentiality as well as the reflection of these issues on the constituent element of knowledge construction and social formation in what could be termed as the ‘new social’, that is, the digital. The integral framework of this research would take off from the meta-modern standpoint in determining the question of privacy and confidentiality, and fitting same as being a conflict between grounds of social-politico organisation of society and individual rights and liberties. Similarly, the State’s duty to protect the social structure against the background of the burgeoning influence of big data companies, and the individual’s responsibility to protect the confidentiality of his ‘digital persona’ presents the reflex point which determines the intersection between the social, political and legal components of digital society. Thus, this research would interrogate the discourses which surround the meta-modern perspective of social formation and knowledge construction, by presenting arguments for a more regulative but not restrictive digital sphere, as it relates to the protection and use of individual data. The research would fundamentally argue that there exists certain level of direct connections between the meta-modern construction of knowledge and social formation with the realistic approach to the question of privacy and confidentiality in the digital sphere, by engaging with the three basic themes of: the constituent element of meta-modernism, the debate surrounding privacy and confidentiality in both the old and new social, and the intersection between both themes
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