Privacy Changing In The Digital Age
One has to wonder, in this age of rapidly expanding online content
, what level of privacy coming generations will have as they grow older. Will they be able to move through the various stages of life normally? Will they be able to change skins the same way previous generations did? With social network profiles, online yearbooks, and endless opportunities for unedited self-expression, will they hold any of themselves back?
People have always studied the past and predicted the future, but up until the 1980s people's personal lives occurred essentially in the present. Everybody knew that a person would go through substantial changes in their lives, and when they did the old persona slid into the past, where it belonged.
Of course, people have always kept records of their personal experience. Long before the Internet made it possible to broadcast those experiences all around the world, many people avidly kept journals and diaries. A committed diarist amassed volumes describing everything from fears to transgressions to hopes to romances to mistakes in vivid, intimate detail. Because of their (at least perceived) veracity some of those diaries have become important pieces of literature. Because they capture the experience of a single person so vividly, they also provide a unique documentation of the time in which that person lived.
Another way that people maintained a personal record was through letter writing. Writing a good letter was an art form, and people aspired to be good at it up until the emergence of e-mail and instant communication. There were books written about how to craft a letter, and the letters back and forth between intimate friends, lovers separated by war or work, family members, or intellectual colleagues were cherished possessions. People even wrote out two copies of a letter in order to keep one, so that they would have a record of both sides of the correspondence.
It is possible that the effort put into journaling and letter writing is one of the reasons why the past was generally allowed to face into the past. Psychologists suggest that describing a highly emotional event in detail and especially describing it more than once helps us to deal with the emotions, gain perspective and closure, and move on from it. Perhaps the process of writing a long, well-constructed letter to an intimate friend and then describing thoughts and feelings related to an event in a journal helped those people to work through the issues.
Now, we live our lives out in the open. The information age has come at us like a locomotive, and although we have welcomed its advantages with open arms we still have not adapted to what it really means for our lives and our society. Technology works better the better it knows us; we have willingly allowed it to know us very well but what can technology, and the world that uses it along with us, do with that knowledge?
Nothing goes away in the world of information. For anybody who has fallen in love and then had to explain all the comments, photos, videos, and updates we've put on our social network profile during our single period this is all too well known. So our lives are not only public, but they follow us, meaning that as we change a public record of the way we were follows along behind us.
What we share with the information universe never goes away. Our often very public record of our experience and exploits remains, even if we try to minimize it. And what remains of it lacks the substance and context of the self-documentation of prior generations. We blog 140 characters instead of writing a five page letter or filling ten pages of a diary with our thoughts and feelings on a subject. Without context, there is no meaning, and without meaning our self-documentation is highly susceptible to misinterpretation. Perhaps, though, this is a temporary problem. Generations who grew up without technology have a hard time grasping its implications, limitations, and capabilities. Generations that grow up surrounded by social networks, online yearbooks, microblogs, and other systems of self-documentation might easily adapt to their new landscape and become masters of it.
by: addyieweeks
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