Privacy Settings: An Experimental Reading Group
Between May and June of 2022, we set up an experimental book club as part of the Privacy Settings project’s research into how literary reading is affected by issues of data-harvesting and data privacy. Participants were undergraduate and postgraduate students from the University of Oxford, who all read Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You and engaged in discussion at the group’s weekly meetings. The conversation between Rooney’s novel and the Kindle app medium would prove a generative one for thinking through concepts like selfhood and power in the digital age. We were ultimately concerned with assessing the imaginative resources available to writers and readers to understand, critique, and resist the changing dynamics of surveillance and privacy today.
The theme of our first meeting was ‘Literary stardom in the digital age’, and the group began with a discussion of what we knew about Rooney and her work. We had all heard of this author previously. Even if we had not read Rooney’s work personally we had seen advertisements and articles, or were perhaps familiar with TV adaptations like the BBC’s Normal People (2020), or the more recent Conversations with Friends (2022). That being said, despite Rooney’s unambiguous popular appeal few participants identified themselves as habitual readers of her work and reactions to Beautiful World were, on the whole, rather lukewarm.
Of course, our contributions to this initial exchange were all underwritten by consciousness of our own place within an academic institution. It was suggested that Rooney’s extraordinary commercial success in recent years seems to bear some responsibility for the relative dearth of scholarship on her work. In other words, one might make the case that Rooney’s literary reputation has suffered as a result of the implicit assumption within academia and culture at large that mass appeal inherently forecloses the possibility of ‘serious’ intellectual value. We found this interesting because intellectual value seems precisely the kind for which her oeuvre’s Marxist socio-political motifs seems to seek recognition. Nonetheless, Beautiful World and the novels that preceded it have become a platform upon which academia and popular culture assert their difference from one another. This became the framework within which the book club’s discussion of issues of privacy and control both inside and outside Rooney’s fictional work took place.
We talked about the very flat, forensic, and observational style of Beautiful World’s prose, evoking the feeling of watching events unfold through a window or on a screen. As readers, our insights into character motivations are obtained primarily through the intensely confessional email exchanges that take place throughout the book between Alice and Eileen, the two main protagonists. Rooney’s narrative choices invite questions about the gaze, and access to the personal. If nothing else, isolating intimacy within the email form in these moments draws attention to the fact that the reader has as much intimacy with Alice and Eileen and their internal worlds as the computer or the phone does. The group considered how reading on a screen emphasises this sense of flatness and detachment from the novel’s subjects; Beautiful World’s commentary on a digitally mediated modernity is intensified and made newly relevant by the Kindle app medium.
These first impressions became a useful springboard for the book club’s second meeting, which focused both on ‘Privacy/private life’ and ‘The novel and late capitalism’. Our discussion ended up being more heavily invested in the former than the latter, and participants shared their responses to the boundary between public and private with which the Beautiful World is constantly negotiating. We thought about how the novel reverses social norms for privacy, visible in contrast between the countless, detailed scenes of sexual intimacy and Rooney’s delay in revealing basic information about the protagonists like names, appearances, backstories.
Later, a few members of the group felt compelled by the presence of Simon’s Catholicism in Beautiful World, but also felt unsure about exactly how it was servicing Rooney’s reflections on the privacy boundary. One answer we gravitated towards was the aspect of ritual which dominated Rooney’s representations of Simon’s Catholic faith. In the novel, Eileen observes Simon’s engagement with religious ritual as being both contingent upon and a vehicle for his sincerity. Insofar as his Catholic faith is a private conviction and a performed, communal activity in the novel’s Mass, ritual is shown to short-circuit the boundaries of the private and the public with a radical openness and a rejection of the private individual in favour of public identification with a community.
However, it was also suggested that Rooney’s carefully cultivated boundary between public and private transforms into a symbolic marker of hypocrisy by the novel’s rather abrupt ending. A time jump in the last chapter sees Eileen succumb to the very social norms of middle-class family and gender roles which her earlier emails to Alice had seen her disavow vehemently. The private opinions she had held were all too easily relinquished; their very privacy effectively freed Eileen from accountability to them. Rooney’s fascination with the modern boundary between public and private is clear, but her conclusions are decidedly ambivalent.
The question towards which our discussion appeared to bend over the first and second meetings was: what is the role of irony and self-consciousness in the novel and its capacity for critique? Rooney’s career thus far has staked faith in the conventional and conceivably conservative novel form as being sufficient to capture the condition of the present, but she is evidently doing so with some sort of awareness regarding the implications of such thinking. After all, Rooney certainly doesn’t hesitate to use novelist Alice to ventriloquise her own thinking about the state of the novel today. But several in the group pointed out that in using these old forms, awareness alone does not inherently translate to self-reflexivity within the text, nor to anything more innately radical than when they are used by a conservative writer. To what extent, we asked, might Rooney’s work from its societal reflections all the way down to its form evince defeatism on a cellular level?
The group’s third and final meeting titled ‘Amazon, data, and literary reading’ sought to more concretely contextualise these analyses of Beautiful World in the Kindle app and the ‘data regime’ in which it partakes. Discussing our experiences of reading Rooney’s book on our phones, tablets, and laptops, we recognised the amount of privacy afforded by the app in our immediate social worlds. Reading on a screen in public spaces anonymises the text we read and even makes it possible to conceal the activity of reading altogether. This discretion, we agreed, might make us more likely to relegate to app form the books that, when reading them, make us feel embarrassed or vulnerable. Meanwhile, the physical book has become a declaration of identity to the public. This modern reading culture where the literary medium affords a new language of private discretion and public statement empowers us to curate a particular kind of private self. But this, we saw, is not a wholly benign nor straightforward trade-off. In order to maintain control over this projected self as it leverages the boundary of public and private, one must not only forgo privacy in the virtual realm but inevitably make ourselves more vulnerable to the platform as it harvests data on an abjected private self.
Our conversation then turned to the phenomenology of reading on the Kindle app in comparison with the paper book. The former, for example, exchanges page numbers for a progress bar. The percentage it shows reinterprets the activity of reading within notions of productivity and consumption, encouraging one to experience reading as the completion of a task. This progress bar is one of the app features that accommodates its more customisable reading experience where font and page layout are adjustable, one can chose between scrolling or a simulated ‘page turn’. Even the colour of the page can be adjusted. Yet, if we experience this as a new sense of agency over our reading experience, we might also ask ourselves: how authentic is this new freedom, which is only really a freedom to choose from pre-selected options on a drop-down menu?
The group considered this in relation to Rooney’s socio-political commentary. Her Marxist critiques ostensibly seek to elicit a liberated political consciousness from the reader, but they also offer a more cynical interpretation as a circumscribed cathartic exercise that ultimately reaffirms the status quo. Indeed, some suggested that the ‘popular highlights’ feature on the Kindle app – which points to those passages in a given book most frequently highlighted by other readers – lent credence to such scepticism. Besides provoking a general feeling of uneasiness among participants, ‘popular highlights’ drew attention to the ‘quotable’ quality of Beautiful World where a series of appropriately profound but pithy phrases appeared all but designed to be lifted from the text and onto marketing campaigns and merchandise.
The book club concluded with more questions than we began. How significant is the difference between reading on a screen and reading on paper? What kind of importance should be placed on privacy when we read? Are there forms of writing or reading on the Kindle app capable of ‘responding’ to data harvesting? Ongoing reflections like these means that our interrogation of Beautiful World and the Kindle app together has been a useful point of departure for making sense of the data the participants have now requested from Amazon, and perhaps laying the foundations for some of these questions to be answered.
Isobelle Cherry is the Research Assistant on the Privacy Settings project. She is a recent graduate from an MSt. in English (1900- present) at the University of Oxford, and has previously worked as a Research Assistant on autism and neuroqueer theory at King’s College London to support the recent publication of an article in Memory, Mind and Media. Her other research interests include working-class literature, late modernism, and mid-century architectural history.
The Privacy Settings project was established by Dr Adam Guy of the English Faculty with support from the Minderoo-Oxford Challenge Fund in AI Governance. For more information on the project, see https://www.privacysettingsoxford.com/.
