What If Privacy Is More Than Hiding Your Dirty Laundry?

The so-called “tell-all generation” is losing its sense of a private life for privacy’s sake.  However, young[er] people are responding to professional pressures and market pressures that demand that a public/private sphere exists for all of its workforce above a certain class level.

I do think that over time, the joke about “if it’s not online/there aren’t pictures/it’s not chronicled, it isn’t real/didn’t happen/isn’t true” took on a strange nugget of truth and absolution for my generation and its relationship to the net.  And since it is a publishing medium, however mutable it can be, the act of publishing something legitimizes it.  Since you can find everything from the sacred to the profane online, it seems natural to share the sacred and the profane parts of ourselves wherever we can display them, for some kind of permanence in what was once a relatively open space.  But now with so many privacy raiders taking over, it’s no longer like we’re tiny specks in an open field of information.  We’re not being watched by people who validate our choices anymore; we’re being monitored by people who will find excuses for us not to work, not to live, not to flourish.  And if that isn’t disaffirmation…

Now we have to find ways of preserving our reality by hiding them in pockets and provisions online — whether it’s locking blogs and pictures, creating secret forums and redirects, cache and IP blockers, multiple profiles/personas etc.  We’ve created fragmented selves (and pseudo selves, to quote blackamazon from a private convo) where generations of private selves used to be.

It’s also a bit telling that people’s private selves from earlier generations are now popular fodder for republishing and sensationalism in our modern media — film, websites, etc.  Not that people weren’t publishing and publicizing journals in the past and making novels out of them; but I think it’s different now because we’re doing it less for entertainment value and more in this quest to hoard and categorize as much information as we can, from wherever we can get it, and the more remote in time the information is from our digital padlocks, the more susceptible it is to reproduction and exploitation for the market and for mass consciousness.

Publishing generational novels/journals/stories — it’s another attempt to demystify the past and bring more absolution to the present.  You see your mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers speaking in colloquial terms about blow jobs and benders in their diaries, and suddenly your generation doesn’t feel so alienated and demonized for enjoying recreational drugs, partying and music.  The only thing is I don’t know if sharing that information creates an environment of understanding or one of more distance between the past and the present.

And I guess here’s where hiding our personal lives really doesn’t help: if we’re trying to say that there are certain behaviors and mindsets that were previously taboo but can be (or are) okay with more exposure and understanding, what does it say when we’re asked to hide them again and pretend that they’re still taboos for survival?  Doesn’t that make them taboos again?  It seems like there needs to be dialogue about reclaiming openness, reclaiming exchange of ideas and not just presentation of moments, and actually trying to build a culture with rules of engagement.  Because when anything goes fails to go, we’re left with old and archaic rigidity that betrays its own hollowness.

The hollowness then breeds executives like Zuckerberg and the types of problems arising around social networking.

Psych Dreams

“I tried to look up if there is psychology research on stereotypes about psychology, but I haven’t found anything yet. Ironically, psychologists study stereotyping and psychology, but not stereotypes about psychology.”

Restructure!, in this comment.

I’d be really fascinated to see this, and not just on a psychological level.  I have theories (wild theories, of course) that the hostility and stereotypes toward psychological studies likely arose around scientific scenarios similar to the Milgram experiment and the Stanford experiment.  Or when results point to the toxicity of constant exposure to stylized violence.  There are a lot of studies in psychology that focus on how power and information affect people, and it would be very hard to be an impartial consumer of all these elements if you understood and processed psychological studies critically on a regular basis.

And by critically, I don’t mean the popular form of criticism — basically finding something you semi-understand, and then stabbing at the rest of the elements around it because their presence makes your knowledge feel less cemented.  By critically, I’m thinking that people would be more interested in the history of how things came to be, and they would study the parts and the whole with more intent and purpose to see how they fit together to form whole ideological landscapes.

Maybe I’m being idealistic.

May 15, 2010

A Request

To Concerned Allies Who Mean Well:

Please don’t travel to Detroit unless you plan to remain for longer than a few hours, a day, or a week.  Please don’t abandon Detroit to a fate like the one Jena, Louisiana is enduring after your last march for “justice.”  I wrote a long time ago about the need for clear goals and understandings before mobilizing any mass descent upon any town.  If brownfemipower is right, and Rev. Al and Jesse are going to “mobilize” you to “march” to Detroit for Aiyana Jones, please understand she is not the only reason you are marching.  Please understand that the issue is bigger than the murder of Aiyana Jones.

I am not saying that Aiyana does not deserve justice, or that the cops who took her life should not face consequences.  I am saying that you should write your media outlets and ask them why they have not dedicated as much mainstream attention to Aiyana as they have to Yeardley Love.  I am saying you should question the claim that “the suspect was found inside the home” when the police executed the search warrant.  I am saying you should question the necessity of filming a documentary of any kind during a high-pressure moment of capturing a homicide suspect.

Question the increasing militarization of police forces and the increasingly militarized raids they conduct.

Think about the consequences of your marches; think about the consequences of your actions.  Reach out to the activists who know the communities and families of Detroit; lend them your ears and tell your senators, your representatives, your media makers to listen to them.  Listen to what they ask of you before trying to provide what you cannot give and what they cannot afford to maintain, what they cannot afford to keep.

Same Wavelength; Different Perspectives

Blackamazon’s question.

Freedom Fighter’s reflection.

Important thing to remember: Some women study other women on a regular basis and never matriculate.

All women means all women. Everyone will not attend your conferences. Everyone cannot afford your books. Everyone will not understand your code words. And the fact that these are truths does not mean that the people were never properly educated. It means that they have learned from other schools, other halls of learning, other points of view, other fields of study. Nothing romantic; but they had to survive somehow, right?

What do we do when whole histories are being carved out of curricula? People can learn lessons from what others refuse to teach and whom others refuse to teach.

Processing Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Slowly making my way through Freire and finding some great quotes:

[T]heir fundamental objective is to fight alongside the people for the recovery of the people’s stolen humanity, not to “win the people over” to their side. Such a phrase does not belong in the vocabulary of revolutionary leaders, but in that of the oppressor. The revolutionary’s role is to liberate, and be liberated, with the people — not to win them over.

I see this dynamic so often; lately the most notable dynamics rest in the Tea Party/Republican Party relationship and in the tensions between Feminists and women who say things like, “I’m not a feminist, but…” There’s an urge in public policy organizations to cater to people’s political tastes and whims; but politics involves action and momentum. Catering is for those who are at rest — the people who sit like dried-out sponges, waiting for the next op-ed or pundit to give them a topic of conversation. Then they take that soundbite or that snippet and they create cycles of talk with very little action behind it. Everything worth doing gets discussed until it meets futility. The energy dies before anything ever began.

I worry when people allow their t-shirts and their checkbooks and their signatures do all the speaking and thinking for them.

One Friend Aided; Another to Go

So brownfemipower has raised enough money to get a new computer! Thanks to very fabulous readers like you, she will now be Writing In Style!

But (yes, there’s a but) another fabulous blogger friend of mine needs to raise money. Her name is Blackamazon.

Now some of you are saying, “We know who Blackamazon is, that lovely brilliant lady Blackamazon. Why are you speaking to us like we don’t know how fabulous she is?” Well, since you’re so knowledgeable, riddle me this: why haven’t you dropped some ducats in her donation jar?

You see, she would like to attend the wedding of another very special woman you may know by the name of Little Light. But travel from New York to the West Coast is expensive. She needs a little over $600, and a recent medical scare gobbled up her savings to go. (She’s okay now; however, the stresses of life and work began manifesting physically. Self-care, world crushing the life force, and other things. But she’s still going.)

So now, make your way over to her fabulous blog, Having Read the Fine Print, and click the PayPal button on her sidebar. Happiness can help counteract all sorts of ills, and attending this wedding would make her year.

Love you, sis.

Things I’m Not Supposed to Say Directly

If I were a blonde pretty white woman, I would likely have a permanent job by now, no matter how incompetent my work product. If I were a blonde pretty white woman, I could make a game of reducing grown men to tears on a regular basis, only to have them return every single time and spoil me rotten.

How do I know? I’ve seen it. And though I know full well that’s not entirely what happened, that’s not the moral of the story, that’s not as complex of a narrative as I could give either of those stories, I know there is a blonde pretty white female elephant in the room that separates responses to what they do from responses to what I do.

Because were I to do anything of these things, I would be an unemployed/underemployed black single bitch. And I’m not doing these things; yet that’s still what I am.

Something is still missing from these narratives, because there are whole gaps in the story I’m deliberately refusing to write. I’m not writing this for sympathy. I’m writing it because even though it is crass and it is simplistic, it is true in at least two instances in my life. And though I have not acted admirably or to my utmost potential, I am unsure that my doing those actions would mitigate those observations in the slightest.

There is a large amount of social capital and expectation I lack, and by lacking it there are things I cannot obtain and actions I cannot get away with. Putting it that way pretties it up and gives it a semi-legitimate veneer. (Okay, not really.)

But what demented instinct makes me wish I could get away with it? The fact that it’s there? The fact that I know I’m a woman, and maybe some others know it too; however there are whole avenues of this society where I am not woman enough to be carried when I do not choose to walk? That’s just… appealing. Stupid, yet appealing. Highly stupid because it’s at the expense of people like me being where we are and wondering why we can’t even try things like that.

I shouldn’t say that. I don’t try it. Some people do and do damned well at it.

But I don’t try it because I don’t want to be slapped back down to my place. Literally, figuratively, or any other adverb.

And then I wonder how many times both of those women I know have been slapped down in some sense of those words in that same social order. Or any others doing appealing things that I have been taught repeatedly not to do. And then I start comparing abuse. And then I head into really testy, stupid waters about whose abuse is most salacious and damning. I factor my empathy out of it so I can win, every time.

And then my empathy roars back into the picture and I lose. I can’t even let myself win!

Then I wonder when I started playing a game. When did my life and the lives of others dissolve into petty pawn moves? Very few of the pawns cross the board to become queens. And no one wants to be king because he can only move one square in any direction while the queen can go anywhere.

But she can only go everywhere for the purpose of saving this plodding nincompoop of a king. And why the hell would I want to do that as a pawn? Why do I have to step out of line to strike anyone? Why are all these other pieces always in my way and telling me where I can’t go until I reach the other side of my fight?

I’m a pawn. I have to move like a king when no one is protecting me, and I’m always the first to go.