Drawing the Line of Personal Privacy Online: Where is it?
The more that I work as a journalist and as a writer, the more I feel the need/desire to censor myself—even just for personal space reasons. I’m a public person for the sole fact that I work in journalism, so boundaries between personal and professional have to be in place to some degree…you have to maintain some level of personal and professional integrity.
The internet was born and came of age after I was born, so the compulsion to share everything and anything about oneself is something I thankfully lack. However, I have struggled at times in deciding what to share of my personal life on this blog and other social media platforms—what do you share that will connect with your readers? What do you share to build some sense of a relationship/friendship with said readers? After all, social media is about and is formed around community, is it not?
Still, I try to keep my personal life out of it…most of the time.
This doesn’t exactly happen when it comes to writing about music. Music is such a visceral experience and the joy in sharing music with others revolves around that innate relationship we all have to music—removing personal experience just isn’t possible. I have the wonderful consequence of listening to some amazing sounds, boomeranging conversations with some prolific songwriters and composers, and at the end of the day teem with an intangible resulting spark.
My work in the industry has undoubtedly led to relationships and friendships that I wouldn’t trade for anything…you find your people where you find your people. What I haven’t wasn’t prepared for (who knows why? It’s the music industry, right?) were groupies (theirs, not mine.) Groupies are different than hardcore fans (All groupies are fans, but not all fans are groupies.) and the lack of distinction between what is appropriate to share and what is far too personal to blast to “public” people IN PUBLIC has me wondering what the hell happened.
Am I just behind on a trend that I find appalling? Or am I the weirdo that looks at the trend of over-sharing personal information as a voluntary violation of personal privacy? Granted, it’s not just groupies that do it…I guess that everyone wants the fifteen minutes of fame that Warhol guaranteed all those years ago. Or perhaps I’m still wrapped up in Marshall McLuhan’s “the message is in the medium.”
So where do you draw it? How personal is too personal? How personal is not personal enough?
And what is the kicker in setting those boundaries?
Information and Access to It = Power
The last few months, the global community has watched as political culture and the law have dramatically attempted to play catchup with technology and its place in our individual lives on both a day-to-day basis, as well as in the lives we share as a world collective.
Information has always equaled power, but we now live in a time where the Internet has allowed for the passage of knowledge beyond cultural and geographical borders at a speed completely unheard of in the past. With the recent Internet blackout by Egypt’s government, it is becoming more and more obvious that those who have access to information—not matter what it may be—hold the power. Discussions of the digital divide stretch back as far as Marshall McLuhan, but perhaps it is only now that we are seeing the fruits of that dialogue.
Who owns information? Who should have the ability to essentially turn it on or turn it off? How are personal freedoms and safety affected? How about the freedoms and safety of nations, as whole entities?
There are no easy answers to these questions. We live in a world that has gradually become more dependent on the internet and the freedom that it provides. Depriving one’s people of said freedom is essentially oppressing them. It may not be a physical genocide, but what Egypt is doing will cripple their population if it continues for any tremendous length of time. One can see the effects of technology-blindness right here in U.S., as so many people are discovering how unemployable they have become without even basic computer skills.
I’m not here to debate whether private information should be shared with the public. Thousands upon thousands of people do it every day on Facebook voluntarily and ultimately, at the end of the day, that argument is better suited as case by case. The matter at hand is the access to it or any flavor of information, in general. If the internet has become one of our primary threads to the many communities and many people outside of our personal bubbles, is it right to cut off that primary life line? I think not and that’s exactly what Egypt is doing. Whether a global blanket of internet access were to exist or international laws in terms of information accessed and distributed via the online world put in place, solutions are complicated.
Only time will allow for the evolution of this situation and hopefully it involves Egypt getting back online.
