really only had for about the past 100 or so years. Before that we all lived
in small towns or small communities where everyone knew what we'd now
consider way too much of our business, and most of us felt powerless to
move. Just consider the modern person's response to *The Scarlet Letter*:
"Why didn't she just move to a new community where they wouldn't treat her
like that?" We functioned in so many overlapping communities that it was
easy for people to piece together the details of our lives without even
trying to.
This was even the case when I was a kid in the 60s. We knew people up and
down the block, we went to school with them and went to church with them.
Because I lived on the same block my father grew up on, and some of those
people had been there since he was a kid, they knew stuff about each other
too. And if you worked nearby... The school nurse at my high school in a
"small town of 77,000" (it was in the NYC metro area, so to me it was a
small town) was having her hair done by my grandmother on the day I was
born, and pointed that out to me when I visited her office one day during my
sophomore year.
Somehow, though, as we became a bit more mobile and able to move from town
to town, starting over again as we pleased, as we were able to order things
through the mail to PO boxes, paid for with Money Orders that didn't have to
have our real name on them, and as our communities started to become too big
for people to know all of our business (or functioned in multiple
communities that may or may not overlap, and might be widely geographically
separated), we got this notion of privacy. This notion that there was stuff
in our lives that we could actually keep from other people.
Then came AJ Weberman, whom many of you of a certain age will recall as the
guy who sifted through Bob Dylan's garbage in the late 60s, and whose
activities were declared to be perfectly legal, since anything you've thrown
out has been effectively "abandoned" by you (hence the later invention of
the shredder), things began to subltely change after that, and now we're
back in that small town where everyone could know too much of your business.
We still expect a certain level of personal/casual privacy ithat we don't
necessarily expect on the Internet. In fact, what we might find perfectly
acceptible on the Internet might be considered creepy from a "normal
person." For example, the idea that a list of all the books I've read or
might be interested in exists out there thanks to Amazon.com may not be
problematic to me in theory. And it may not even be problematic when Sue, a
casual acquaintance, looks at that list to get an idea of what kind of stuff
I like. But when she *says* that's what she's been doing, that's when we all
get a little creeped out - even though we've all done something like that.
And yet, there still is part of me that wonders how different these
companies we patronize over the Internet having all this information on is
from the "old days" when the guys at the butcher shop and the fish market
knew exactly what you wanted when you walked in the door, and probably
talked to each other about it.
--
keg
========================================
Keith E Gatling
mailto:keith@gatling.us
http://www.gatling.us/keith
The fact that I'm open-minded doesn't mean that I have to agree with you.
========================================
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