Public and Private

One of the most notable trends of the past 20 years has been the blurring of public and private. We see this with the 24/7 demands of many jobs. We see this with the unrelenting parade of political scandals, the celebrity revelation du jour, the newest crop of reality TV shows. We see this with blogs.

In "Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog," Carolyn R. Miller and Dawn Shepherd note that:

This confusion of public and private permeated other media [in addition to television] in the late 1990s as well. Cell phone ownership increased rapidly from 5.2 million in 1990 to 55 million in 1997 (Eng, 2002). As people sacrifice privacy for the sake of convenience, one need but visit any public place to overhear the intensely personal conversations of total strangers on cell phones.

Do we really want to be privy to the secret lives of others? When are communications inappropriate and intrusive? For many of us, there is no greater horror than being stuck on a bus or train, listening to the "warts and all" banter of our fellow passengers (to misquote Sartre: "Hell is other people's conversations"). Stop after stop, shifting uncomfortably in the seat, subjected to all the intimate, disturbing, salacious details.

Why is a blog any better? Aren't we still peering into the dark recesses? The Internet, like the train car, is a public forum. A blog, like the discomforting conversation, is readily accessible. With a blog, though, we need to log on and opt in. We don't have to read it but we do. And, through our comments, we can participate in the discussion (granted, you could offer your two cents to the passenger recounting his drunken night out -- just be ready to dodge a punch).

Both the train conversation and the blog straddle public and private spheres. The difference? With the blog, one hopes, the discourse is informed, intelligent, and insightful. With the blog, we're a willing audience, not a captive one.