On publicly being (day 134)

Being more public is apparently something that we are urged to do by the new norms of being online.  Twice today it came up in things I was reading:  the new generations are not so concerned with privacy.  They will be used to sharing their lives online.  My generation is at a disadvantage because we have to unlearn being private.   I must admit that is not at all what I had in mind when I made my new year's resolution last year of being more public.  I felt I had to contribute more, become a less passive participant in the information space.  I am still ultra concerned with my public persona.  Even this blog contains almost no personal details about my life in the sense of the high frequency of daily ups and downs.  It's still somewhat surprising to see some of my earliest posts to newsgroups back in the early nineties.  There's nothing there to be embarrassed about but I wonder if I'd been posting in my teens what I'd be regretting now.

The problem I see with the new generation being so unprivate is that their sense of decorum might not be developing in tandem with their online temerity.  Their awareness of the archive may not be so keen now but it may be painfully so later.  It's possible I'm only worried because my generation is more concerned with public image and the archive.  It may be that future generations will build in a generous sense of forgiveness into the archive.  A sort of 'what happened in facebook, stays in facebook' for the teen years...that is, until a bitter career fight or divorce proceeding.  Who knows.  If I had a kid I would talk to them about the inherent responsibility of being public.  And I would educate myself about how to erase the archive, the legal issues related to that.  Because if you can't control your information it's not really you being more public, it's whatever the applications want to take from you.

A song for this post.