What If Privacy Is More Than Hiding Your Dirty Laundry?
May 29, 2010 4 Comments
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.
About problem chylde
It’s a fine fine line that people dance upon with exposing one’s personal life online. As long as that person is a self-employed person, it’s ok, otherwise, be careful.
I can see some of the principles of Maslow’s “Heirarchy of Needs” to be at work here. As basic survival needs become more important, it seems that it would only be natural to retrench, erect barriers, protect and consolidate your base, making fewer and fewer forays into a larger potentially dangerous, and certainly more judgemental, critical, and less tolerant society. But………..Celebrate the exceptions! They allow all of us a bit more freedom of personal expression than we would have otherwise.
It’s a delicate balance between how much you keep to yourself and how much you share with others. But the options seem to be to build steel walls between the public and private or to demolish the barrier altogether. I hate binaries; they make my toes itch. lol
Maybe someday when I have spare time I’ll try to write on crafting new definitions of privacy and private lives. Sometimes I feel they’re valuable; other times I think we may experience a deeper bond as people if we start sharing some of our vulnerabilities. Not all of them; but it’s easy to feel alone when there aren’t conversations about the rough times and the good times. And you can teach others lessons sometimes by sharing things you go through. Hmmm…
I think it’s harder for people to change when they have shared so much in a permanent format. In old, old times little, if anything was written down or photographed, so who you are could grow and evolve, at least within the bounds of your society. Some could move, but many could not.
In more recent “old times” you could move and start anew, with changes and growth and little to track or reflect who you once were.
But how easy is it for people who announced every 16 year old opinion to the world ever to change how they are seen? Self-identity is largely created by how others perceive you, and if you’ve lost control of that, have you lost a good deal of your ability to grow and change who you are?