Boundary Permeability—How Much Information Can Flow?
Boundary permeability refers to the degree that privacy boundaries are porous. Some boundaries are protected by ironclad rules with those in-the-know sworn to secrecy. These barriers are impervious to penetration. Petronio refers to such
informational barriers as closed, thick, or stretched tight . Often that information is quarantined because public revelation would be highly embarrassing for those in the inner circle.
At the other extreme, some boundaries are quite porous. Petronio describes them as open, thin, or loosely held . Information permeates them easily. As barriers to disclosure, they are a facade. To the extent that privacy rules are supposed to check the fl ow of insider information, they are honored in the breach. As the movie Mean Girls illustrates, some confidences are meant to be spread.
Permeability is a matter of degree. Many coordinated access rules are crafted to be filters, 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? Biologically, 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 first, later speaking of their HIV status only if the response to the first disclosure is nonjudgmental.
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 confidants need to negotiate mutual
rules for possible third-party dissemination.