Thought For The Day

The subject? The right to privacy. The point? We really don't care about it that much anymore. The proof? You're reading it.

Truthfully: If privacy really mattered to me, do you think you would be reading this right now? Do you think any of the million (billion?) blogs and vanity pages out there would exist? People can read this blog and find out more about me than my parents (regular readers) knew about me when I was living under their roof as a child.

I turn you over to the brilliant summary of this line of thought by Walter, guest blogging over at AndrewSullivan.com:

In the land of manic attention-getters, which is what the country's become in the age of American Idol, Oprah, and nonstop self-revelation on the Web. Consider the wild growth of MySpace. Com, a service that grants all who use it at least the hope of obtaining an audience for their biographies. The personal secrets that people broadcast on this and other websites far outstrip, in intrusive depth and detail, anything the government is capable of gathering. Users cough up, without ever being asked, and for the benefit of perfect strangers, every last sexual quirk, obsessive thought and grandiose fantasy that they can render in words. And then they add pictures. Sometimes naked pictures.

They spill their souls onto the Web as though trying to purge themselves of loneliness through exhibitionism. It's not Big Brother prying into our lives that we have to fear, perhaps, but the Little Brother in each of us who craves the notice of others -- even if he has to make mischief to attract it.

I think that each of us has a private part of ourselves that we don't mind the rest of the world seeing: Otherwise we wouldn't put it on the internet. Other parts, we keep to ourselves. I have my own privacies and they can't be found on this blog. And we all have more crucial parts still... the parts that are not private now but may be (we're not so pregnant at the moment, but maybe we will be and don't want parents/boyfriend/abusive husband to find out) private in the future, and we would probably like to keep it that way.

So while I agree with Harold that privacy is certainly not as cherished as it once was, but the theory of privacy... and the vagaries of protecting it... are all important to us.