This article is devoted to the relation between privacy and behaviour in public places. It has already been more than half a century since Erving Goffman published his notes on the social organization of gatherings. Today, the context for meetings in public places is round-the-clock monitoring—exposing oneself online, giving other persons access to one’s privacy through internet applications, and being under the eye of the camera 24 hours a day. This context means that the delicate balance between—to use Goffman’s terminology—the stage and the wings has been disturbed. On the basis of field material visual diaries kept by over a dozen persons in the Poznań area), the author concludes that people spontaneously create privacy shields. He presents ten grassroots protective strategies to show that people in contemporary cities spontaneously balance what is private with what is public.
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