Nobody Outs Rosa Parks
“Is there such a thing as overuse of social networking tools?” asked The New York Times over the weekend. “In the online world, is the notion of a public/private divide simply not applicable?”
Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU and scholar of the social effects of the web, presented an interesting point, complete with an anecdote about his wilder days:
When I was a junior in college, I spent a semester studying abroad. We were a small group of students, far from home and not well integrated into the life of our host country, so a typical Friday would involve settling in at one of our various seedy flats and drinking.
One particular Friday evening, which started with lime-free tequila shots and moved to swigging cheap vodka from the bottle, my hair caught fire. (I think — though I am hazy on the details — that I may have set it on fire myself.) In any case, my hair lit up quite nicely, which might have alarmed me while sober, but on that particular evening, it seemed like the sort of thing that happens from time to time.
Fortunately, my friend Paul was better able than I was to imagine a bad outcome from leaving my hair alight. He leapt to his feet, staggered to the couch where I was sitting, and extinguished my head. My haziness notwithstanding, I have an indelible image of Paul leaning over me, his face lit by the flame, as he blew out my hair like a birthday cake.
Good times.
It’s a safe bet that one or more pictures of those proceedings would be on Facebook, had I not been born so deep in the last century that we had no Facebook.
Society has always carved out space for young people to misbehave. We used to do this by making a distinction between behavior we couldn’t see, because it was hidden, and behavior we could see, because it was public. That bargain is now broken, because social life increasingly includes a gray area that is publicly available, but not for public consumption.
Given this change, we need to find new ways to cut young people some slack. Privacy used to be enforced by inconvenience; you couldn’t just spy on anyone you wanted. Increasingly, though, privacy will have to be enforced by us grownups simply choosing not to look, since it’s none of our business.
This discipline isn’t just to protect them, it’s to protect us. If you’re considering a job applicant, and he has some louche photos on the Web, he has a problem. But if one applicant in 10 has similar pictures online, then you’ve got a problem, because you’ll be at a competitive disadvantage for talent, relative to firms that don’t spy.
People my age tut-tut at kids, telling them that we wouldn’t have put those photos up when we were young, but we’re lying. We’d have done it in a heartbeat, but no one ever offered us the chance. Now that kids have these capabilities, it falls to us to keep our prurient interest in their personal lives in check. Just as Bill Clinton destroyed the idea that marijuana use was a disqualifier to serious work, the increasing volume of personal life online will come to mean that, even though there’s a picture from when your head was on fire that one time, you can still get a job.
Could our overshares ever be accepted and embraced? It makes me think of a piece in The Austin Chronicle from March, which predicted the changes in society if this were the case:
This is who we were: communities of individuals who forged identities, selves, and lives via formal (or informal) interactions within a societal whole. We met one another at home, school, work, play, and everywhere else, and we did it all face to face. We were first persons singular or plural, intensely social creatures with a craving for companionship but neurotically fixated on who, exactly, we really were. I was and we were writers who wrote, readers who read, and artists who actuated the unreal, cunningly, with artifice that reflected not only our own inner selves but also the identity – the soul? – of our surrounding communities. Persons of cerebral substance, literally, recognizing ourselves in the morning mirror and muzzily wondering if anyone else saw what we saw. That was us for millennia.
This is who we are: communities of individuals who are online half the time; often inseparable from our laptops; clustered in the muted, ambient click-type drone of coffee shops or working late into the night alone in home offices; hearing the quiet pattering of unclunky keyboards; the kids in the kitchen instant-messaging before the bus arrives, after the bus arrives, on the bus; Dad scrolling through Slate/Wired/Salon or eyeing the tumbling economic dice; Mom wondering why she even bothered to get that now silly-seeming Realtor’s license; chatting; texting; iPhoning; linked-in; sharing our individual triumphs and tragedies, from Obama to Mumbai, in real time, for all the online world to see, read, and share. We are as quick and relevant as our streams of consciousness (and Twitter) allow. Today, transparency trumps privacy, because, honestly, who wants to keep it all bottled up at a time like this? Share enough, and maybe somebody will care enough.
This is who we will be: a single community; global; linked-in; variegated and living lives beyond the passé 20th century notions of borders, beyond languages; a new species almost, Philip K. Dick-ensian in our comfort with multiple on- and offline identities; keenly aware of the marketers and corporate data-mining that exist primarily to sell us back to ourselves; and able to take advantage of the strange sense of slow self-empowerment that arrived near fully formed once we realized privacy as it once was is no longer privacy as it has become, or needs to be. The more we share – online – the less we have to fear. Transparency is the new privacy, the new safety, the new community, the new flesh, the new you, me, I, we.
In 10 years’ time, no one will remember that racy photo you uploaded to your MySpace profile following a drunken collegiate revel, even though it will still be there, for those who care to dig down through the Web 4.0, 3.0, 2.0, hacking back through the digital crust into the ever-present past. Ten years from now, your twentysomething predilection for obscurantist Japanese hentai B&D porn will seem more quaint than sordid or even titillating: archaic, digital daguerreotypes with tentacles. Does it matter? Do we care? We’re digital pioneers birthing digital natives who will have to evolve, socially, psychologically, possibly physically, as fast as the data stream. Their very concepts of “self,” “community,” “privacy,” and the way they view and mirror their world – as individual people and as part of a far greater, online whole earth – will be as different from our current definitions of the same, as the Paleolithic cave paintings of Lascaux are to the digital artisans of EA or Rockstar Games. Long live the new unflesh? Maybe. Probably. Yes.
… Why not? As a species, we’ve been building walls and erecting boundaries, metaphorical and otherwise, since the apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey upgraded bones and blood for bricks and mortar. Why not start cyber-kicking holes in the fences, the fortresses, the prisons with which we’ve surrounded ourselves? Personal and societal self-discovery on an epic, historical scale appears to be finally within striking distance for much of the online world. Humanity’s me generation is being force-evolved by onrushing technology into some new state of we.
On May 11, the acclaimed author Paulo Coelho blogged about revealing shameful acts. He asked his readers to respond in the comments.
He received 195 responses.
Sharing connects us. In the web, we have found a new way to do it. And as Coelho noted in his post, telling these stories sets us free.
Bruce Sterling, Austin’s “once-and-futurist post-cyberpunk seer,” who was interviewed by The Chronicle put it this way: “there’s a lot to be said for being ‘out.’ Put a bold, Nicolas Sarkozy-style public face on your indiscretions. If you quiver all over, thinking you should privately hide in the back of the bus–’I'm private and invisible here, no one should know I exist’–that just strengthens the hands of bossy people who want to keep you hidden in the back of the bus. Nobody outs Rosa Parks.”
I imagine that image of the future and I like it. But it’s not here yet. It’s in our hands to bring it, to shatter the world with our truth.
Who wants to go first?
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May 27th, 2009 at 12:52 am
The truth sets us free, and admitting the shameful indiscretions from our past allows us to own up and renounce them… or whatever.
A friend recently asked me why I’m so very open about certain things – particularly my journey into sobriety – online. My response was about transparency: Everyone had seen me completely fucked up in person, and they might as well know those days for me were over.
And as we also discussed in that video chat a few nights ago, oversharing (or sharing at all) on the relationship end is a topic of some interest to a lot of people. My recent shenanigans (i.e., the fake relationship with Francisco Dao) were meant to flaunt and highlight the nature and consequences of romantic oversharing online.
All that to say that I’ve had online transparency/oversharing on the brain, that NYT article pissed me off, and I actually hoped you might have something to say about it.
As for me, to an extent, I love and crave being out. I like having nothing to hide and nothing to prove.
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AV Flox Reply:
May 27th, 2009 at 2:43 am
It’s a fascinating balance.
Overshares that have a tendency to reflect positively on one’s image–such as the choice to quit drinking–are useful in terms of damage control. They say, “I’m not going to get embarrassingly wasted at your events anymore.”
But there are other overshares, like, “I love eating cum,” which may not generally enhance one’s image. These are the type which are viewed as more problematic. In an environment where you deal largely with both social and business circles, such overshares may not go over as well.
Further, the sharing on one side to a large audience on the other with limited real interaction between them creates an imbalance in terms of interpersonal relations.
For example, it’s startling to meet someone IRL for the first time and have them say, “so you finally got a divorce, huh? Good for you! He didn’t deserve you,” or, “you weren’t the best wife either, you know.”
It’s, like, whoa. What’s your name again?
When I started blogging some nine years ago or so, I had just a few readers, and I made very strong links with them. We read each other and commented frequently and really connected. But as our readerships grow, we begin to lose the ability to connect. Access to you is limited once you get close to that magical Dunbar number. You just don’t have the time or emotional resources to go that deep anymore.
So you have people who read you and care and feel they know you, but you don’t really know them because you’re stretched so thin with life and work and the people that you already know.
The resulting relationship is a parasocial one, where one party is exposed to another, but the former has no idea about the latter. The lack of one-on-one interaction greatly limits the relationship and results in a host of conclusions on the part of readers that may or may not be right. It’s complicated. You do expose a lot, but the connection is not a solid one.
I have people come up to me at events and say things like the ones mentioned above, and these may be right, but the initial feeling is one of intrusion. The immediate response is, “how the hell do you know and who the hell are you anyway? You don’t know me!”
It’s unsettling. There is an inherent desire in a lot of us to expose ourselves. We have blogs, we tweet publicly, we comment about our lives in the blogs of people we have never met. And it helps. It helps to not feel alone when we encounter the strangeness life has in store, whether it’s divorce or sobriety or love. It’s more than exhibitionism: it’s the desire to have conversation and connection. But at a higher volume, that connection is threatened in a way that can be incredibly overpowering.
I look at my column and especially my Twitter stream in more reflective moments and feel like I’m naked in the middle of a room with a couple thousand people watching. Despite the feeling of being liberated by my truths, I also experience the vulnerability of this position.
There higher the numbers go, there less connection there is. And there comes a point, too, where the crowd stops seeing you as a person. I hear people talk about Justine Ezarik, Nick Douglas, Jason Calacanis, Julia Allison and Sarah Lacy all the time like they’re not even people. They’re douchebags, attention whores, and assholes and it’s open season all year long.
Entire websites are dedicated to their abuse. For what? For sharing thoughts and ideas. For putting themselves out there. Sure there are personal conflicts in some cases, but a quick survey of people running most of these campaigns will reveal a lot of them don’t know any of the above-mentioned people personally.
That’s why I ask, “who wants to go first?” I believe in the healing qualities of the overshare. I believe in how stories help bring us together and offer solace in times when we feel most alone. But I am weary of the openness, too.
I don’t want to be alone in the center of a room. I want to be surrounded by people with whom I can connect in that naked way.
But we’re not there yet.
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