Public Journalizing

Back in my day, girls kept diaries, which almost always came with a lock and key. The locks were actually useless since they could be opened with a straight pin, but they were symbols of the books' private nature. Even if we didn't have anything exciting or risque to record, we would hide our diaries under the mattress, or in an old hat box, or maybe in the bottom of our dirty clothes hamper. We didn't want to risk having anyone peer into our secrets, even our boring secrets.

Today, people post their whole lives on the internet. Nothing seems too personal to share. It makes me wonder what has changed.

I've read articles that say technology has created a generation with little desire for interpersonal interactions. They say young people spend their time on computer games that let them assume new identities and allow them to interact with artificial people. They say all this keeps them distant from other human beings. Perhaps it does for a while. But the popularity of cell phones and text messaging indicates to me that this generation is dedicated to communicating with family and friends.

The danger of the internet isn't that it is diminishing human relationships and communication. I think the danger is that it is changing the nature of those interactions. I am concerned that we are creating a generation of exhibitionists and voyeurs.

It reminds me of an old joke. A young woman calls the police to complain that her neighbor is a Peeping Tom and is always looking in her bedroom window. The police talk to the neighbor and he says the young woman has the habit of keeping her curtains open while she parades around nude. When the police tell the young woman what the neighbor said, she answers: "Well, that doesn't mean he has to watch."

Exhibition and voyeurism. They go hand in hand.

The internet makes it possible for us to parade our thoughts around in their barest form. We feel that we are doing what we want in the privacy of our homes while we type away on our kepboards. When we post the end result, we are opening the curtains so anyone can view or ignore, evaluate or praise or criticize, what we say. Like the nude young women, we don't need to take responsibility for what we present. No one is forced to look. Likewise, those who gaze through the window don't have to take any responsibility because what they see is openly presented.

This seems wrong to me. When we talk with someone, we share equal responsibility for what is said and what is heard. I think we need to take an equal responsibility on the internet. We need to think about whether the messages we are posting have any value, and I think we should give feedback to the authors of what we read. That way we won't be exhibitionists and voyeurs. We will be joint participants in an interaction.