"Take that, Time Magazine. I'm not blogging about Frances despite my love for her, or in a frenzy of self-aggrandizement that is blind to vast potential harms. I've actually sat myself down, looked at the potential consequences of both actions in the short and long term, and concluded that less privacy around the work of mothering while it might lead to short-term embarassment (though that is far from clear) will be one of the best tools in the fight for greater societal supports for families which Frances herself will probably need and hopefully benefit from one day"

AMEN! This statement really sums up it up for me--the gender aspect of it.

This larger issue of privacy is interesting to me also, because I also wonder how much it is related to how, culturally, we cling on to a notion of a bounded and cohesive self that must be protected. One aspect of online networking that fascinates me is how this is less a mechanism for self-exposure than development and creation of the self. (yes. i am a recovering postmodernist).

i am interested to hear what you say about photographs. it's something i grapple with myself as a non-poster of pics.

I am guessing that yet another terrific post is linked to yet more insomnia? What's terrible is when you learn to live with it. When I was sixteen, another hour's sleep was the most important thing in my world.

I was sixteen in 1958 -- and my elders were, indeed, horrified by Rock 'n Roll and Elvis and all that. What I did back then was construct a 'good girl' persona which I gave to the world (including my parents, friends, and sometimes myself) and beneath which I could experiment with being myself as far as I could understand it then. Serial sex. Experiments with alcohol. Petty vandalism. Big risks if you got caught. Probably not much different than getting your masturbation video outed (I didn't know girls could masturbate). I never got caught.

I saw the 'Time' article yesterday and read the New York mag one this morning. Fascinating stuff. My first thought was that I would have loved UTube, etc. My second, that these kids are not any different than I was; they are inventing themselves, as all generations of adolescents have to do. As you, the mothers-who-blog, are also doing. I would have given anything, as a young mother, for a circle of virtual friends (and another hour's sleep).

I think that what privacy (with the concommittant inability to talk about anything meaningful) really is is a cage, a cave, a bunker you huddle in to avoid the bombs. And yes, you really pay. You buy safety at the price of learning to live.

Another brilliant post.

I had a letter a few months back -- by mail, to my house -- from someone praying for my soul because one of my books includes stories about women's decisions to terminate after finding out that their baby would not survive until birth or would die shortly thereafter. The woman said obviously I had been made bitter by my stillbirth. My point is that if people have strong enough feelings about an issue, they will want to make their point quite pointedly. (Painfully bad sentence construction.) I'm sure if I'd tried to bury myself away with ten layers of privacy, this person still would have found me.

I think privacy today is an illusion. That doesn't mean I want to be careless about my privacy, however. I'm selective about what I share/don't share. I wrote earlier today about where I'll be on Saturday and about the fact that I'm fighting off depression right now. Both involved sharing personal info, but in both cases, the benefits of sharing info justified any downsides I can think of -- e.g., having people who read my blog think I'm a flake because I struggle with depression at times.

Oops -- pointed to the wrong blog. Here's where I posted about the depression thing. [Is it flaky to point to the wrong blog?]

Joy--I wonder that, too. I can't help but think that taking the chaotic messiness of real life and forcing it into a narrative structure with meaning, conclusions, symbolism etc., imposes a meaning on real life and ends up inventing the person writing it. I know that I feel that way about what's here--that it is in an important sense not really me, but a sort of alternate me.

Mary, I don't think the sleep thing for new mothers has changed. ;)

Thanks, YT. :)

Andrea (she said with her best wits-end mother voice),
Don't you know that I need to get work done. Cut this out already. There have been too many enticing posts in a row now. Could you stop being so convincing and provokative at the same time?

Yes you are right here. Your arguments are compelling. However, I still maintain that systems of power have a vested interest in stealing bits of our selves and our private selves in order to capitalize for themselves and repress us in the process.

For example, there is a program/service called "Turn it in dot com" that helps professors track plagiarism. Universities have signed up for this service in droves. For this system to work, a professor needs to get all students to submit their papers electronically, the papers are then uploaded to Turn it in, and then are kept in a database of college and university papers against which potential plagiarism cases can be compared. This totalitarian system is great for professors and universities b/c it helps them catch a few cheaters. Student lobby groups, however, recognize it for what it is: a blantant theft of intellectual property and an invasion into a domain of circumscribed privacy (one paper for one professor in one course).

Now, let's add the next layer. The server for Turn it In is in the US. The US is currently under the protection of the Patriot Act. The Patriot Act gives the American government the right to demand such information for no valid reason (no matter what country the information originated in b/c once it it is stored on the US server it is in the US jurisdiction). Do you think students might feel a little uneasy about the intellectual property of a generation of new critical minds being entirely fair game under the Patriot Act?

You arguments against privacy hold up in a world where the rapist and bullies are brought to justice and where governments and institutions are progressive in their vales such that they do protect the public when such cases come forward. My contention has always been that I do not believe we live in a world of progressive values, not in our institutiuons and not in the population at large. In fact, in North America the political climate appears to moving increasingly to the right and government policy is increasing supporting the privacy of power groups (like the military and corprations).

Yes, I agree that we should blog and say what we want and not be silenced or forced into a private space. (Heck, I even post pictures readily now--I didn't always--but then I realized that my words had more symbolic value for me than the slap-dash pictures I took but if someone convinces me otherwise I may change my mind). Yes, I agree that if we have a camera phone and catch the Minister of Justice in a hit and run (to cite a local example) we should use that information to seek justice. Yes, I agree that instances like the one you mentioned yesterday or the Rodney King case or the Somalia teen tortured by the Canadian military example go a long way to prove your point.

Take, as a contrast, the case of Maher Arar. We will never know what the US has on him (which we can feel fairly confident is nothing given all that enquiries in Canada have proven) b/c the US gov't has sanctioned power that will always guarantee its right to privacy.

For you to say that personal privacy has served destructive ends and then prove it is one thing: you, Andrea, activist and engaged citizen, bring a concentrated critical mind to everything you do. For a new generation to come along and reject privacy simply because they have never had an expectation of it is another thing altogether. In this model, the citizen foregoes all rights while governments, the military and corporations retain them. That, my friend, makes me nervous. The North American political climate has been stable for a good long while now but history argues against stability.

No, I don't worry about my daughter's privacy (that much) when I blog b/c aside from the world being irritated by mommy bloggers, the whole experience of motherhood is still so degraded by society that no one will care in the end what it is we have written (apart from ourselves, our families and our children).

Will I still fight as a librarian and engaged citizen for a reasonable expectation of privacy for all citizens? Yes. Will I try to raise my daughter into a similar awareness of this? Yes.

(BTW, I love the bloggy back and forths this week. Now if only I had posted all the comments I've made here and at Bub and Pie's, I'd have a week's worth of blogging wrapped up.)

Ann, are you kidding? When I had two blogs I did it all the time.

I agree re: privacy. But I wonder if our calculations about what's worth it, and what isn't, aren't influenced by a cultural predisposition towards privacy as an inherent good, if that makes sense, or a focus on the potential short-term negative consequences of non-privacy (shame? criticism?) vs. the potential long-term benefits (changing societal views on issues, resolving personal histories, etc.).

I love all this talk about blogging as constructing the self. I never thought about it that way, but now you say it, it's so true!

I hear what you're saying, Andrea, about privacy being a way to hide bad (or evil) behavior that should to be brought to justice. But also, privacy is a way to hide yourself from other people who might be bad to you. If society thinks it's awful for a man to dress up like a woman, then he does it in his own home w/o fear of consequence. But if it's videotaped? Now you may argue that society shouldn't think that's bad, and if we video all men dressing as women then eventually society will change its opinion; but that's not much consolation to the guy who lost his job and all his friends, is it? It's one thing for *him* to post the video, to say to the world: this is what I do. But it's something else again for someone to out him.

Also -- well, let's talk about YouTube. If you know that anything you do or say is likely to be filmed & posted to the world, then will you start censoring yourself every moment of every day? I know that I consider my posts carefully before I publish them; in this brave new world, do I need to be that cautious before I speak? Do I need to be that cautious before I take a step? Hey that would make a GREAT science fiction story: a society in which very little happens and everyone is quiet because they're so cautious of being videotaped! It would be like that introverted society in the LeGuin story, forgot the title.

BTW I wonder if kids today are so blase about privacy because they're young and naive and don't have anything to lose. The worst that can happen to them is that their friends will ostracize them, which is bad but not THAT bad. Wait until they have jobs which can be lost, children who can be taken from them, countries that might deport them...

When I posted the second time, I got the link wrong! Now that's flaky.....

http://www.motherofallblogs.com

OK. Internet, please promise me that no one else is going to comment while I'm responding to the last one.

MH, thank you for your incredibly detailed comment.

Absolutely. I agree that private citizens not having rights that governments and corporations have is a big problem (and I would extend that to the right of governments to maintain standing armies and police forces and the right to use violence against citizens without prosecution, as well as a choice few others). This may be too cynical--but that's the gold standard definition of the modern state. It always has been, too--we are in an age where it is far more extreme, but the state has always had the right to collect private information about citizens that citizens could not collect about themselves or each other. How much and under what circumstances have changed; the technology has changed; the underlying power structures, IMO, haven't.

I'm not saying that's good, it's definitely not; just that it's not new.

We also definitely don't live in a world of progressive values. But if we're going to get to that world of progressive values, IMO, we can't keep everything private. It still ought to be under the individual's control, as long as their control does not negatively affect the lives or the rights of others, but that's a long way from saying that privacy is in and of itself always or inherently good. Or that it is possible to advance social causes while adhering to conservative social mores out of a (fully justified) fear of hte consequences. I mean, those critical thinkers, assuming they want to effect change in the world, will have to go public at some point. They don't have the choice of keeping the government ignorant of their beliefs, only controlling the moment when they become aware of them.

I don't think the answer is more privacy for citizens (beyond what I described above); I think the answer is less for governments and corporations. Not that this is likely to happen in the short term or (realistically) the long term. And, who knows, maybe a generation growing up who does not believe in privacy will have a harder time settling for a government that won't spill the beans. I think our generation and older generations have always accepted the argument that there are things that governments and corporations should legitimately not have to share with citizens.

Internet, I am very disappointed in you. Was it so much to ask?

But Jennifer, the thing is that countries and governments have always done that. They are doing it more often now, and to a different group of people (heretofore untouchable middle classes), and they are using different tools. But certain groups have ALWAYS been vulnerable to abuses of privacy and authority. They just paid spies or bugged phones or planted people in activist groups or whatever. There are lots of instances where governments or police forces sent someone to sign up with a group they thought was "too radical" and tried to incite them to violence so they'd have an excuse to arrest them.

There is no way in which anyone can have both complete privacy and effect social change. In order to effect social change, one must eventually go public. In the end, does it matter whether you go public yourself or someone else does it?

Yes, it's terrible when someone is outed--to me, though I don't know how much that perspective is formed by my own assumptions, which might or might not be valid. But that's a case of one person both profiting from and paying for privacy, and the costs and benefits are theirs to judge. But in any instance where one person or group pays for the privacy that another person or group benefits from, that privacy is inherently harmful, not good.

I'm not saying that all privacy ought to be flushed down the toilet; I am saying that privacy is not inherently good, only good sometimes, in some situations, for some people.

OK, I want to comment more but now I am at home with the kid and even though I see myself as an integrated self as a mother, I cannot blog and parent at the same time. I'll try to get back later with a comment that talks a bit about the right to privacy vs exercising free choice as to whether we divulge parts of our prvate selves. Later...

It's a very interesting argument, about privacy being bad, or at least not inherently good. What I'm stuck on is the idea of a person being able to control when & where they are "outed." Should I behave as if I'm being outed every second of every day, in my house or outside of it? And -- is that how the youth of today behave?

I'll have to ask my neice. She's 21. She told me once that she went to a party, and when she came home she had already rec'd via email or IM or whatever several pictures of herself at that party, and also rumors about her relationship with her boyfriend. In fact she said this happens all the time. I wonder if she thinks of the internet as just extending the reach & speed of the rumors -- who cares whether the gossip begins that night or at school the next day?

OK, back again.

Yes, I agree that less gov't and definitely less corporations would be ideal. Likely? Not a snowball's chance in hell.

I'm also not arguing for more privacy. I am simply arguing for autonomy over privacy. The students who write the papers may choose to make dissenting beliefs known at some point but they should have the right to choose when that moment is. University is about learning, about trying on ideologies, and about making mistakes and bold claims. The rights of a student to experiment with knowledge without threat from the state should be held just as sacred to universities as academic freedom for faculty is (where and when it actually is b/c I realize this is another fraught issue entirely).

I'm big on pro-choice: not just when it comes to reproductive freedom. People should be allowed to choose what parts of themselves they keep back and what parts they divulge. As a blogger, I choose to divulge a lot. Others don't. I'm not so big on people being outed--unless of course a crime has been committed; even then, for the sake of the bullied disabled boy, I do wish that justice could have been served without You Tube entering the picture.

And the thing is, with so many of these examples, it's not that the private sphere is being exposed or questioned; it's just that stupid people and military personnel don't know when to keep their videos hidden. The rapist or child molester still has the opportunity to play it smart and protect his shroud of privacy and protection.

For people to feel a degree of comfort in relaxing their public/private boundaries there does need to be a sense of safety with the outcome. Will I put my chid danger? It's less likely if 10,000 mothers are blogging but in the end, more people questioning the nature of the private sphere only takes us so far. What is needed is institutional change and that is unlikely.

Yuck, what seemed a coherent argument at 3pm has devolved into blather at midnight. Sorry. I tried.

I think there are a few different threads here. Maybe that's why it's getting so confusing.

#1-Academic freedom. To me, this is not a privacy issue. I see where you're coming from, and I wholeheartedly support academic freedom, but it's more of a free speech issue. Turning it into a privacy issue seems like a retreat; in essence, admitting defeat (since we can't say what we like anymore without penalty, we'll fight for the right not to say things instead).

The students in your example have chosen to speak publicly; they didn't choose to whisper it in the government's ear, maybe, but knowing that the government is listening in means that students have the freedom to explore and write on less controversial subjects while finding their sea legs, if they choose. Which again, makes it a freedom of speech issue: it shouldn't matter that the US government has access to student papers. It really shouldn't. As long as they respect the freedom of speech that prevents the government from penalizing people for speaking. (Though I have to wonder--if millions of students annually are trying on radical poses in their papers, how is the government going to find and track the ones who really mean it?)

#2-outing. I think this comes back to what you were saying, re: 10,000 mommybloggers spreading the risks a little thin. We may be on the cusp of a similar change wrt privacy issues generally: what are the risks and harms of being outed when everybody is being outed all the time? It's terrible to be the first, or the only person in town or in a city to have your sex video posted online or a scene of being bullied or cross-dressing in your own apartment. The risks and harms would be huge. But if everyone is being outed? If these are common, everyday occurences? Sure, everyone knows you cross-dress, now; but you also know that your next-door neighbours are swingers and your neighbours across the street belong to an obscure snake-throwing sect etc. etc.

I'm not about to start outing people. There are plenty of online folks whose real identities I know, including people I don't like, and I have no intention of making that publicly available. But in a world where everyone's real identities were always publicly available, most likely, outing someone would not cause the same damage.

#3-crime. See, I don't agree. I think in a world without privacy, the shame from stepping forward as a victim would be so reduced taht the cost-benefit for victims would entirely change, and THEY'd report the bastards. There would be no shroud of privacy anymore, because their victims would no longer feel compelled to protect their privacy.

I think when we keep things behind the wall, we are primarily motivated by one of two emotions: shame and fear; shame being more relevant to discussions of crime (and fear being more relevant to discussions of government intrusion). But in a world where everyone is "eternally on display," would shame and fear result from not having a private life? I doubt it. I think it would change the rules of the game too much.

#4-the likelihood of change. Oh, hell yes. There's nothing to convince you of hte futility of major change like being an armchair anarchist. But on the other hand--lots of major, institutional and systemic changes which seemed completely outside the realm of possibility 100 years ago are now taken for granted. And they were dragged kicking and screaming into the light of day by people who refused to be cowed by the fear that institutional change was too unlikely--by people who defied scientists who said it was biologically impossible and politicians and economists who said it would destroy civilization and historians who said it had never been done before, and on and on. So, I think, to see real social change a certain amount of stubornness, a refusal to submit to what seems likely, is required.

I admit that there is a tension here between the rights of the individual and the rights of the collective. I like the idea of every person deciding their own publicly displayed self--but if this course of action, when pursued collectively, dooms meaningful change to failure, do we still have that right? Should we?

I don't know the answer. But I think that's where we're stuck: Change requires people who live publicly, brazenly, on the edge of their skins. Safety requires us not to do so. But maybe the end of privacy will render the question moot: once we all know everything there is to know about each other, we'll look around and say, "So THAT'S what we're really like." And wonder what we were so scared of.

(Maybe.)

There's got to be a cross reference between what is 'looked down on' and what is public. I don't know the figure, but I bet the percentage of people (men and women!) who don't report rape is bigger than the percentage that do, and that's before you get to sexually abused kids. Rape victims are still regarded as having asked for it in a lot of people's (so-called) minds, including some untrained law enforcement and medical professionals.

This 'breakdown of marriage', speaking of systemic changes. I am convinced human behaviour has not changed. It is now not as much 'looked down on' to be divorced or living together.

It's not that we need to know everything about each other as much as we need to tolerate what we do know. Nothing scares me as much as a fundamentalist, whether Christian or Islamist.

In the end, you remain an idealist. Me. Not so much.

Again, I'm in awe of both your post and the content of the comments thread.

On the subject of younger people not caring about the "traditional" ideas of privacy: It's interesting how some them end up in the news, offended that their high schools have suspended them for posting pictures of alcoholic parties on MySpace pages. One way to think about it is that when there is no privacy, everything you do have to be aboveboard, or you'll pay some kind of penalty. Celebrities already live in that world, where dates with the wrong person, extra pounds, or shaved heads make the news.

MaryG--Amen--though I know plenty of agnostic and atheist fundamentalists, too (just not for religion).

Thank you, Lady M. This comments thread was a lot of fun.

That is an interesting example. It'll be interesting to see how that plays out--because you know they were having the parties anyway. What's more serious, getting sloshed or photographing it for posterity?

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