Escape From Nowheresville

It was on a dog day afternoon in August on 6oth Street off of Fifth Avenue in the earliest days of cell phones.  A red-faced, perspiring man in a suit and tie was shouting into his brick-sized phone “I am a very private person.”  I was on the opposite side of the street but we were alone on the block.  I couldn’t help but think I had wandered into a New Yorker cartoon.  That scene has never left me and I have frequently come back to it when thinking of issues of privacy.  What is our notion of privacy, expectation of privacy?  The boundaries are always changing.  When I was a kid we had neighbors whose phone service was a “party line,” a shared connection which anyone could hear.  At the same time, mail was considered sacrosanct and I still won’t open something not addressed to me.  I never think of my phone conversations or emails as iron-clad private and yet, I never used my work email for anything personal and vice versa.  We all have self imposed boundaries but the speed of technology and the insatiable demand for information makes the evolution of these boundaries difficult to maintain, hard to reconcile.  So much superficial stuff, TMI, is out there competing for our attention.  It’s hard to balance but we must.  Ours is a participatory democracy and the most important part of that is how we educate ourselves.  We need to expose ourselves to the news daily, weekly, monthly, in forms that are immediate and breaking as well as those that take a long view.  We need to be thoughtful and deliberate.  The national security “scandal?”  I never had an expectation of privacy on the phone or in my email.  The debate?  We had it leading up to the Patriot Act and, as I recall, if you raised any questions you were considered un-Patriot-ic.  We trade off every day, opening our bags for inspection, removing our shoes.  We tweet, we “like,” we sign up with our emails.  We are tracked by location services. Google analytics lets everyone know where we visited, how long we stayed and what we looked at.  In Law & Order you knew when Briscoe pulled the LUDs (Local Usage Details of the phone), the case was as good as solved. What can we do?  Participate: read, think, vote, let your representatives know how you feel.  You have a right to remain silent but you have an obligation to speak up.

SPM