In the age of Twitter and Facebook, we all offer up pieces of our privacy in exchange for what? A sense of community? Bonding with others? Reassuring ourselves that our lives have value and that we are not alone?
The outrage over government surveillance and invasion of our privacy is rather piquant in view of all this voluntary self-revelation.
Parsing such history in the New Yorker Jill Lepore notes “the paradox of an American culture obsessed, at once, with being seen and with being hidden, a world in which the only thing more cherished than privacy is publicity. In this world, we chronicle our lives on Facebook while demanding the latest and best form of privacy protection—-ciphers of numbers and letters-—so that no one can violate the selves we have so entirely contrived to expose.”
Yes, yes, self-exposure is not the same as others snooping, but can’t we find some balance between moral indignation (pace Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald) and Barack Obama’s reassurance that he is not Dick Cheney, bending over backwards to protect our privacy while keeping us safe from terrorist attacks?
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