A World Without Privacy

November 3, 2013

     Imagine a world without privacy: Your neighbors look through your windows, you are surveilled by the government, retail companies track all your preferences, your personal information is available online, and photos of you taken at different stages of your life are readily available on the Internet.

     Some would say that is the definition of a political candidate, but it is not of them that I am thinking.  Rather, it is of every one of us: more and more we give away all sorts of bits of information about ourselves without pausing to consider how doing so might eventually make less, rather than more, of our lives.

     Take internet dating sites, which ask prospective users to supply answers to all sorts of questions of a personal nature, ranging from "Have you ever had sex with someone of your own gender?" to "Do you recycle?"  The data is all voluntarily supplied with a view to matching up those with similar likes and dislikes and providing a template for projected compatibility.  

     Of course, there is no guarantee that the answers to the questions are any more true than the declarations of love of virtual partners.  No doubt a social scientist will interject an objection to my skepticism here, averring that well-constructed surveys yield remarkably consistent evidence that certain types consistently prefer to be involved with people having similar characteristics, allowing room for a degree of individual manifestation of these characteristics.  Romances can develop between people brought together specifically because they match for compatibility.

     My own take is that 1. we live in an unromantic age, so romance is a rarity; 2. when it does happen, it does so because the two people enjoy an intuitive complicity that cannot be programmed for.  Well-crafted questionnaires may be able to determine which people will share similar views on fundamental questions, but they don't generate that spark that used to be called love.

     Romantic love, is of course, a concept that emerged in the waning of the Middle Ages: tales of a high-born married woman chastely courted by a virtuous knight propagated an ideal of intimate relations between men and women driven by the natural affinity of two persons, rather than dynastic ambitions.  The ideal enjoyed centuries of popularity not just because it was nearly unattainable, but also because it enshrined the individuality of the two lovers, and the inimitable nature of their affections.  Each great pair of lovers - Abelard and Heloise, Guinevere and Lancelot, Tristan and Iseult-- loves in their way, which is distinct from any of the others'.

     Which makes that idealized romantic love, when it exists outside the literary sources from which it sprang, a way of differentiating ourselves from the common run of mere relationships of convenience.  Students of romantic love in the groves of academe will agree that such love manifests itself only in the early stages of a relationship, and that unless there is a progression to a more practical level, the two individuals will drift apart.  So even as we may initially love and lose ourselves in another, the continuance of the relationship requires acceptance of the mundane aspects of life together.  These  heighten our sense of being separate individuals with separate preferences, if most of the time we prefer what life together offers to life lived alone.

     What that life together can offer is tenderness, mutual understanding and solidarity.  In a world where privacy is less and less possible however, those aspects of love are challenged by competing claims: the drive for professional advancement and public recognition, the impulse towards public display of success; and the herd instinct that makes people of similar social or professional backgrounds follow similar trends in clothing, entertainment and transportation choices.

     We are a consumer society and our relationships are built around consumption, which requires display.  There is little inhibition about self-display left: other than sending around naked photos of oneself, no one thinks putting photos of themselves on social media sites is exhibitionism.  Yet we are "celebritizing" ourselves by doing so, and adopting all the narcissistic mannerisms of those whose lives are lived in the public eye, particularly if we are under twenty-five, as we have never known a world where it was not the normal thing to put a photo of yourself in a bikini on a website for all the world to see.

     What kind of intimacy grows in the soil of public exposure, the compost of outward display?  Call me a curmudgeon, but no one ever fell in deeply in love with someone because their photo was plastered all over the Internet, or because they were carrying a particular handbag  --even the one they are photographed carrying in the photo posted on the Web .