Marjolein Lanzing

Big Brothers and Little Sisters

Recent empirical research regarding young women’s experiences on social media platforms points out the tension between the participatory, empowering aspects of social network sites (SNS) for the development of meaningful social interaction, relationships and identity construction on the one hand, and the oppressive dynamics present in and fostered by those very same spaces that hinder equal opportunities for self-presentation and the development of meaningful social relationships on the other. While surveillance on SNS is framed either in terms of positive (peer) surveillance or detrimental (lateral) surveillance, Lanzing aims to interpret our ambivalent stance with regard to the empowering and oppressing aspects of (social, commercial and self) surveillance on SNS from a normative perspective by examining this tension from a (feminist) relational autonomy viewpoint.

Marjolein Lanzing is a PhD student at the Department of Philosophy and Ethics at the Eindhoven University of Technology. Her research ‘The Transparent Self: Identity and Relationships in a Digital Age’  is a normative interpretation of the changing norms of privacy under the perspective of the changing meaning of the Self in a digital age. Marjolein is a member of the Amsterdam Platform for Privacy Research and editorial assistant of Philosophical Explorations, a peer-reviewed philosophy journal, specializing in the philosophy of mind and action.