Thursday, February 11, 2010

Privacy Settings

“You should never eat alone.”


This is a lyric from an African song I overheard during a presentation at school today and it got me thinking. The lyric is about sharing, and it reminded me of a scene in Logan’s Run where the protagonist is upset that his female companion saw him eating. In that society, eating was a private thing, much like going to the bathroom, and to be seen eating was highly embarrassing. It made me wonder what makes us choose the privacy settings of our lives. It seems to me that privacy is a very subjective thing, and that modern society has changed our views of privacy. I see it in my students and the things they feel entitled to post on their Facebook and MySpace pages.


I think the erosion of privacy began with television. Having strangers come into your living room night after night (or day after day) started to ease our feelings of who is a stranger and who is not. Fans of television shows began to react to the characters as though they were real people, as evidenced by the interaction between fan and actor in real life. Many television villains have been accosted on the street and treated as though the actions they performed on last night’s show were actual things they did in their own lives. Some fans have had a hard time distinguishing between fantasy and reality, and the idea of what is private, for that actor, changed.


Privacy took another hit with the daytime talk show phase. Starting with Phil Donohue, through Sally Jessy Raphael, and most famously, Jerry Springer, talk show hosts have encouraged people to air their dirty laundry on nationwide television while viewers watched like ghouls at a train wreck, eager to stuff their empty lives with the scandals of others. These shows furthered the idea that interpersonal relationships were mere sideshow attractions to be gawked at by a curious public eager to see sensation over substance. These talk shows evolved (if one can call it that) into the courtroom shows, beginning with The People’s Court with the infamous Judge Wapner, and spawning a myriad of like-minded “Let’s sue em” shows like Judge Judy, Judge Joe Brown and…well, you get the picture. Here come de judge, and he/she’s makin money!


More recently, we’ve seen the burgeoning “Reality TV” market. It started with Survivor and has grown exponentially until we’ve been barraged by the likes of The Bachelor, The Bachelorette (naturally), Shark Tank, and (unfortunately) Jersey Shore. Viewers become so involved in these shows that they follow the cast members as if they knew them personally. One show even mocked its own genre by calling itself “Big Brother.” 1984 is here, and privacy has never been so threatened. These shows further the idea that revelation is fun…it’s entertainment, and furthermore, it’s the fifteen minutes of fame we were all promised so long ago.

So what’s with the overlap of entertainment with reality? What’s the harm? In my mind, the harm is of great importance, because once we devalue our privacy, it’s very easy to give it up. By viewing the revelation of what should be private moments, ideas and actions, it gives permission for us to reveal our own little secrets. Because we’ve seen it so often, it becomes part of what we accept as normal. We bare our souls to total strangers on the internet and feel like we’re safe because it’s just words on a screen, but many don’t realize that those words, once they’re sent into cyberspace, can float around for a very long time indeed, and perhaps come back to haunt us. We blog; we post; we IM, but who’s really reading us? Who will read these words once I post them? And what inferences will be made about me by those who do read? These are consequences most don’t even consider, and that’s frightening to me.


What will privacy look like in 10 years? In 50? And will world events cause those who already think privacy is “no big deal” to give up privacy altogether, perhaps without even realizing it? I think that’s what scares me the most…that people won’t even realize they’ve given up their privacy because they had so little regard for it in the first place. But there’s hope. I’ve spoken to two former students who are in the process of removing pictures from their Facebook pages because they realize that prospective employers might not appreciate them; that they’ve revealed too much…and that’s a start.

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