DIVISION TWO
RDT 2.0: DRILLING DOWN ON BAKHTIN’S CONCEPT OF DIALOGUE
5. BOUNDARY TURBULENCE—RELATIONSHIPS AT RISK
176 INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION
breach. As the movie Mean Girls illustrates, some confi dences are meant to be spread.
Permeability is a matter of degree. Many coordinated access rules are crafted to be fi lters, letting some private information seep through, while other related facts are closely guarded. You may wonder how this could apply to Nate and Becky’s situation. Isn’t HIV infection like pregnancy—an either/or thing? Bio- logically, yes, but Petronio describes a number of ways that disclosure could be partial. For example, Nate might talk about movies that sympathetically portray AIDS victims, enthusing about the Oscar-winning performances of Tom Hanks in Philadelphia and Sean Penn in Milk . Or, similar to the sexually abused children that Petronio interviewed, he could drop hints about his condition and watch for signs that others would handle further disclosure well. Along that line, some gay and lesbian victims reveal their sexual orientation to others fi rst, later speak- ing of their HIV status only if the response to the fi rst disclosure is nonjudgmen- tal. As with boundary linkage and boundary ownership, collaborative boundary permeability doesn’t happen by accident. The practical takeaway that CPM offers is an insistence that disclosers and their confi dants need to negotiate mutual rules for possible third-party dissemination.
CHAPTER 13: COMMUNICATION PRIVACY MANAGEMENT THEORY 177
resort to using their own privacy rules to guide what they say. The result is turbulence and a patient who is often embarrassed or unhappy.
In like manner, doctor–patient confi dentiality can be compromised. As one doctor admitted, “When the patient is accompanied by a friend or relative, we’re often unclear about that companion’s function in the interview.” 23 From the legal standpoint, once the patient invites someone else into the mix, the physician no longer has to be concerned about confi dentiality. But the patient may be shocked when his wife hears the doctor reveal alarming test results, offer a depressing prognosis, or refer to a previous medical condition that she knew nothing about.
Intentional Breaches
Sometimes those who are now-in-the-know understand that the original owner will be horrifi ed if they blab it about, yet they reveal the secret anyway. They may do so to actually hurt the original owner or simply because breaking the confi dence works to their personal advantage. A painful romantic breakup is the classic case when the spurned partner lashes out by revealing intimate details that make the other look bad. Petronio didn’t run across disloyal breaches in her study of unoffi cial health advocates, but she did discover intentional boundary crossings when advocates faced a confi dentiality dilemma . These occurred when patients said things to their doctor that advocates knew weren’t true or avoided revealing embarrassing medical information that advocates knew was important for the physician to know.
Petronio cites the example of a man who tells his cardiologist that he quit smoking after his heart surgery. His daughter who’s present is in a quandary.
She could respect her father’s privacy but by her silence put his health at risk.
Or she could violate family privacy rules by revealing his continued smoking so that the doctor can make an informed medical decision. She faces a tragic moral choice where whatever she does is wrong. Petronio found that advocates placed in this position opt for health over privacy, and speculates, “Perhaps in cases when safety or well-being is at stake, privacy issues seem less signifi cant for those trying to help.” 24 In support of this interpretation, she notes that one man poignantly explained why he breached his wife’s privacy boundary —because I did not want my wife to die.
Mistakes
Not all boundary and relational turbulence comes from privacy rules out of sync or the intentional breach of boundaries. Sometimes people create turmoil by making mistakes, such as letting secrets slip out when their guard is down after having a few drinks. Medical personnel are just as prone to committing com- munication blunders as the rest of us. For instance, doctors make errors of judg- ment when they discuss private cases in public places. Petronio cites a report of two doctors on a crowded hospital elevator debating the merits of removing a portion of a man’s lung. One of the passengers who heard them was the patient’s wife. 25 We commit the same type of mistake if we assume that only friends will access private information we post on Facebook or we don’t recognize that peo- ple around us can hear our end of a cell phone conversation. A miscalculation in timing can cause similar distress. Doctors and nurses have been known to phone
Confidentiality dilemma The tragic moral choice confidants face when they must breach a col- lective privacy boundary in order to promote the original owner’s welfare.
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people in the middle of the workday to tell them that they have cancer. There’s no good way to deliver that devastating news. But to do it at a time when the person may be interacting with co-workers takes away the chance to process the stark reality in private.
I have my own medical example of what Petronio calls the bungling of topic rules, although bungling is too strong a term for the brief words of a woman who meant to put me at ease. As I was rolled into the operating room in a tranquil- ized state, I saw that the surgical nurse was a former student who’d taken all of my classes and had babysat my children. She bent down to me and whispered,
“Don’t worry, Em, people under anesthesia say all sorts of bizarre things, but we never take them seriously.” I was no longer tranquil.
CRITIQUE: KEEN DIAGNOSIS, GOOD PRESCRIPTION, LESS AMBIGUITY
CPM is a communication theory that nicely fulfi lls fi ve of the six criteria for a good interpretive theory. Petronio painstakingly maps out the different ways people handle private information and discerns why they make the choices they do. This understanding of people is furthered by the qualitative research that she and other communication scholars conduct to expand their knowledge of privacy management. Typically their research takes the form of open-ended interviews such as those Petronio conducted with sexually abused children, but Petronio also draws on the results of quantitative research to support the theory’s conclusions.
This extensive research and the fact that CPM provides a needed focus on privacy, where before there had been a theoretical void, has created a community of agree- ment on the worth of the theory among communication scholars. In medical terms, CPM provides an astute diagnosis of the use and abuse of privacy rules.
As for clarifi cation of values , CPM presents privacy as valuable in its own right, not relationally inferior to openness, transparency, or self-disclosure. Addi- tionally, Petronio upholds mutually coordinated privacy rules as the best way to establish effective boundaries that protect co-owned private information. It’s a bit of a stretch to say that the theory calls for a radical reform of society the way some critical theories do, but Petronio clearly believes that healthy relationships within a community depend on trust and that they’ll be less at risk when people follow her research-based prescription for the prevention of turbulence.
The interpretive criterion that CPM does not meet well is aesthetic appeal, which is a matter of both style and clarity. Petronio’s organizational style is one of arranging her insights into multiple lists. The result is a confusing array of classifi cations where the connection between the lists isn’t always apparent, nor is the relationship among items within a given category. Clarity is a problem as well. For example, in Principle 4 and throughout much of her writing, Petronio indicates that people who co-own private information should negotiate mutual privacy rules. Yet in another summary version of CPM, Petronio seems to directly contradict this principle. She writes, “As co-owners, the recipients have a responsibility to care for the information in the way that the original owner desires.” 26 That’s acquiescence or submission, not negotiation. It’s also confus- ing, as is Petronio’s frequent use of qualifi ers such as may be, tend to be, possibly, perhaps, and sometimes.
Petronio is aware of these problems. In 2004, she wrote a wonderfully trans- parent article entitled “Road to Developing Communication Privacy Manage- ment Theory: Narrative in Process, Please Stand By.” She describes “a stage of
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