I was watching The Colbert Report last night, and Colbert was talking about the secret documents posted to Wikileaks. Tom Blanton, the executive director of the National Security Archive and "one of those Open Information Guys" came on the show to talk about why he thought the leaks were a good thing.
They ended the interview speculating on why Brad Manning allegedly leaked the documents in the first place. "I don't know," Blanton said, "...maybe he's just applying the Facebook mentality to all these classified documents. You put it all out there. You put your embarrassing videos out there, you put your secret documents out there."
Maybe what we're seeing is a paradigm shift over what IS private. In the past, we've had different faces that we've presented to the world. Our private face, what we show to our family and close friends, is different from our professional face, what our boss sees. And that is different from the face we show at Church, or the face we wear while hanging out with a group of not-as-close friends. But maybe, now, all those faces are slowly merging into one. Maybe the discussions we have about what should be public and what should be private are more and more incomprehensible to younger people because there is no private. It is all public.
Maybe this means our "public faces" will melt away, and we all will stay true to our inner selves. OR (cue the doom-and-gloom music) maybe the "private face" will be the one to melt and we will end up without the opportunity to actually express who we really are.
Or this private-is-public thing is just a phase that will pass. That's probably the most realistic. The other two are much more interesting to contemplate, though!
I think the "facebook mentality" as you put it is just the technological manifestation of a mentality that has been around for a long time. People love to talk and people especially love to talk about themselves and gossip about other people. We're a social species, right? Facebook is just way faster than any other form of communication we've had so far. Once we only had letters and they took days or weeks to deliver by ship or stage coach. Then we got computers and e-mail which is much faster but someone had to check their email. Now, we can use mobile devices, like the one I'm using to write this post, and communicate anytime there's a signal or electrical power!
ReplyDeletePersonally I don't want a facebook page because I would rather wonder what people are doing instead of not caring what they're doing because I can just check facebook in a few seconds. Sounds backwords, but I think it makes friendships more meanigful.
Blogs - those seem different. You say you're
merging your private life with the public sphere but ate you really? Aren't you on some level censoring what you say when writing a blog? Imagine you were writing an autobiography or an op ed for a newspaper. You would reveal just ad much for those types of media, right? It's just that the Internet us faster.
Good luck with the blog! I look forward to reading your eclectic posts!