Wearing sunglasses: the need for a thin self-protective barrier?
In our culture, the lines between private and public life are eroded by social media–we have been learning variants of this lesson for so long that it has become forgettable by its familiarity. How can we expect modesty and self control from bloggers in a culture that increasingly celebrates self exposure?
Tell and show all isn’t new. There has long been a strand of celebrity culture devoted to self-drama and -revelation, but in the days when modernists made such judgments, most forms of self exposure were linked to low culture. Now we call it popular culture.
People say anything. People live their lives on camera. People want to share. Blogging is part of this wave that lets the inside out, that does away with boundaries. Yet there is a tension. Many of us still want to preserve some sense of inviolate self–of there being more to us than meets the eye, of having an inner life or core.
Our blog has focused on privacy ethics–how we owe it to others to protect them for exposure and exploitation, particularly as it flows from telling family stories. Yet how does what we owe ourselves factor in? Should we dive head long into “tell all” mode, or is there something self-harming or hating in this? Thinking about ethics as a personal code of conduct shifts the ground and questions. What if mine is the privacy I need to consider and respect?
Tell and show all isn’t new. There has long been a strand of celebrity culture devoted to self-drama and -revelation, but in the days when modernists made such judgments, most forms of self exposure were linked to low culture. Now we call it popular culture.
People say anything. People live their lives on camera. People want to share. Blogging is part of this wave that lets the inside out, that does away with boundaries. Yet there is a tension. Many of us still want to preserve some sense of inviolate self–of there being more to us than meets the eye, of having an inner life or core.
Our blog has focused on privacy ethics–how we owe it to others to protect them for exposure and exploitation, particularly as it flows from telling family stories. Yet how does what we owe ourselves factor in? Should we dive head long into “tell all” mode, or is there something self-harming or hating in this? Thinking about ethics as a personal code of conduct shifts the ground and questions. What if mine is the privacy I need to consider and respect?
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