One Man's Treasure ...

Dear fellow inmate:

(I hope you've done your reading from last time, so you know why I'll address you today as "fellow inmate"!)

I've been thinking a lot lately about these kind of websites ... like this one, Blogger/Blogspot. It performs many functions private and public. For many it's like that secret diary you had when you were a giggly little kid. You hid the key and tucked it under your mattress ... a private confessional to yourself, or to your better self you wish you were, to somebody else. And when your mom poked around in it you were angry and perhaps a bit embarrassed. But you had only yourself to blame ... if you wanted to keep something private you wouldn't have written it down, right?

Anyway ... Facebook, MySpace, YouTube ... they all represent a very strange newish compulsion, namely to coyly confess a mixture of your "true" self, your True Self, and some fantasy version of yourself to the electronic ether, both as if no one will ever see it and also in a self-conscious way, that presumes someone is watching. Only the most naive of us think this stuff is private in any way, and we should expect that there could be consequences to our revelations. While we sit comfortably at home, basking in its privacy, we are broadcasting and revealing, sometimes more than we realize, when we participate to these sites. To blur the lines even further, consider the real life-turned soap opera story of "lonelygirl15" (before she was "outed") - a real person, who is an actor (well ... barely an actor), playing a "real" girl who fantasizes both about being well-known (perhaps as an actor), and about who might be watching her. Even her outing turned into a drama that confuses the lines between viewer, actor, drama, person and persona.

Poking around these sites is like being the guy who takes his telescope and peeks into every window just to see if something ...anything ... is going on. And posting to them is like the really hot divorced lady two blocks over who vacuums in the nude with the drapes open ... "Oh ... you're looking at me ... shame on you ..." I call this new phenomena "webcoyness" ... no ... I like "e-coyness" better. Well ... it's still not great, but I'll keep thinking about it ... this psychological phenomena deserves a better name.

As Andy Warhol noted, everyone will get their fifteen minutes of fame (and more than 25 years ago he very presciently recognized the newly developing compulsion in western culture with fame for fame's sake, achieved by any means necessary), and the generation of those 30 and younger have shifted this to a higher gear than ever before, using the cheap tools at hand ... all you need is a computer, a video camera (or even just a video cell phone) and an Internet connection ... and voila, you are a broadcaster, entering the "I can be famous" sweepstakes.

Consider this, however, and roll it around a bit in your mind. All of these web-sharing/diary/confessional websites are examples of our voluntary incarceration in the New Panopticon ... one person's free communication is another's loss of privacy. The more information we supply to the Internet, the more we become visible to anyone who wants to watch, like a flash of movement in the open window. And all that activity will provoke more and more people to watch. The web brings out the voyeur in all of us, and more and more people are walking around out there, in their "e-bungalows", without their clothes on and with their drapes open, so to speak. Don't be surprised if someone is watching, maybe someone you'd just as soon not be. And if you post to these websites don't pretend that at least some small part of you is not seeking your fifteen minutes; don't pretend you don't like the idea that someone might be watching!

J.A.I.

NEXT TIME
What rights (to privacy and otherwise) should we allocate to self-publishing bloggers? Has everyone become a de facto or perhaps even a de jure member of the fourth estate in the new panopticon?