the publicity of privacy
At a more humanistic level, I don’t believe that identity is contained solely in one person. Every person that you encounter becomes a part of your internal makeup to lesser and greater degrees. What you glean from other people is effected by your inherent predispositions, but still I think we are intensely impressionably from day one. As we grow up we may become more savvy, or we may just fall for the same things in different guises.
What also changes with this personal interaction is which information we choose to disclose publicly. On the one hand our society feels very open compared to the Victorian era, as an example. On the other hand, when people tell the intimate details of their lives it still feels like trespassing to me.
There has been in the postmodern world, a shift in how we think about the private and the public. Today, family and personal life is a public conversation, whereas a hundred years ago a person did not openly discuss these kinds of matters. Conversely, business affairs have become increasingly covert and become more private.
While it is not as simple as a dualistic conversion of the public and private, the way we look at information about each other and our world has shifted paradigmatically in the last century. How we create public discourse is neither an individual exercise or an actively group affair. Shifting cultural perceptions result from a collected swarm of influences such as technology, economics, geography and architecture. I don’t think we can consciously decide where to take society, just as we can’t always consciously control what we are going to say in a given situation, or how we are going to say it.
In his book
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere Jurgen Habermas discusses the bourgeois concepts of privacy:
Discussion as a form of sociability gave away to the fetishism of community involvement as such: “Not in solitary and selfish contemplation….does one fulfill oneself� in the circles of the bourgeois public---private reading has always been the precondition for rational-critical debate--�but in doing things with other people…even watching television together…helps make one more of a real person.� (158)
Stressing the importance of sociability, our concept of community does not support the loner or the recluse. People who do not participate with the majority are looked upon with suspicion or perhaps considered mentally and emotionally flawed in some manner. As a culture we value interaction and participation, even if only sitting next to each other in front of a screen. Is that what we are doing on the web?
Is the web a way to spend time alone with other people? Can we still validate our sense of community safely from the web? And, can we interact on the web without the pressure to behave in a certain way, perhaps likened to the way small children go a bit bananas after they’ve been buttoned down in a formal setting for awhile?
But is this the type of freedom that we need? Does it distract us from the deficiencies in non-web interaction? On the one hand it can feel like hiding and seclusion, on the other it can feel like reprieve. As humans we need both a fertile inner-life as well as a sense of community. Some of us are more comfortable on the inside and some of us cringe at the thought of ever staying in. There are also those amazing people that achieve that thing iI've heard about called "balance." But, at any rate, wouldn’t it be great to feel comfortable in both arenas?
Posted by wood0072 at December 4, 2005 7:36 AM