VI of X. Sense and Consequence - Public and Private in Virtuality
This entry was posted on 3/4/2008 9:28 AM and is filed under uncategorized.
2 March 2008
VI of X. Sense and Consequence - Public and Private in Virtuality
In "The dangers of blogger love," Joshua David Stein writes of conflicting delineations between public and private in the blogger world, especially as it relates to romance (New York Post, Page Six Magazine, 10 February 2008). He recounts an 'interoffice' affair at his prior job (Gawker), in which his girlfriend held everything between them and her life in toto as blogging domain whereas he held a distinction between public blogging life and his private personal life, as he states:
"I still felt there was a clear divide between the work me and the real me. For Emily, the work her was her."
Interestingly, Stein chooses to associate his work as his public identity and everything outside of work as his 'real' identity. Rather than a multiplicity of roles, he defines for himself a multiplicity of identities. This aside, I find equally interesting Emily's lack of boundaries - or lack of respect for boundaries:
"Not only did she love me, but I found out that she reads my e-mail."
Ahem. Mail, electronic or otherwise, is federal property. For her to read and/or intercept mail not addressed for her is still a federal crime, by the way.
Felony aside, I think the most telling explanation for Emily's behavior is in her question to Stein:
"Don't you know that private is public?"
Let me just interject a bit of common sense here:
Private is private and public is public. The respective definitions have not changed. The manner of their intermingling has, due to the recent mediations of electronic technologies allowing individuals to transcend traditional boundaries of time, space, and geography, as well as those of normative dualities.
To transcend is quite a different issue than to defile.
The manner of Emily's 'public' - everything private in which it is a "faux pas to actually discuss anything she had written" - is a rather sham public bordering more on voyeurism and exhibitionism. Public proper is all matters of public discourse. It is a discussion a la Habermas in the ideal and Arendt in the practical. (More importantly, it is a discussion for a later blog, although I did write on public and private in a prior posting...)
The point of the matter is the error when public and private are transmogrified and mis-defined when the duality should rather be voyeurism and exhibitionism. Emily was a exhibitionist and voyeur. Stein was a voyeur-in-denial.
Impersonality and interpersonality are similarly at the core of this duality.
To the realm of voyeurism - she illegally viewed his e-mail and they played a game of impersonal penetration and desire.
To the realm of exhibitionism - she blogged about her private thoughts and the intimacies of her emotions, feeling, and romantic exploits. She used electronic impersonality to mediate an interpersonality at a (safe) distance. On a different platform, he distinguished electronic impersonality with human presence and interpersonality without distance.
The point to all this?
When operating at different tempos (qua Nietzsche), there is a fundamental fissure of disconnect between perspective. On a social level, this affects relationships and leads to social errors. On a political level, this effects misunderstandings more consequential as it relates to nations and the livelihood of such tensile, delicate, and vulnerable international political relationships. To wit, a misunderstanding of language today becomes a war stemming from fundamental misunderstandings of normative definitions and values tomorrow..
...of diplomacy, interpersonal and international...
