Nick Carr and Steven Levy on Private, Public, And Secret

Gabriel García Márquez once wrote “Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life.”

Recently, the juxtaposition between different social spaces seems to be grating on the nerves of a few prominent members of the commentariat, when what was private becomes public, or what might have been secret is revealed.

Nick Carr thinks social sharing is creepy:

[from Sharing is creepy]

There’s an arrogance to sharing the details of one’s life in public with strangers - it’s the arrogance of power, the assumption that such details somehow deserve to be broadly aired. And as for the people, those strangers, on the receiving end of the disclosures, they suffer, through their desire to hear the details, to hungrily listen in, a kind of debasement. At the risk of going too far, I’d argue that there’s a certain sadomasochistic quality to the exchange (it’s a variation on the exchange that takes place between celebrity and fan).

Steven Levy feels a deep angst that so many are following him on Twitter, when he isn’t saying much. He also uses the word creepy.

[from Steven Levy on the Burden of Twitter]

The more I upload the details of my existence, even in the form of random observations and casual location updates, the more I worry about giving away too much. It’s one thing to share intimacies person- to-person. But with a community? Creepy.

[…]

The latest source of my dilemma is Twitter, which lets you spit out real-time reports about what you’re thinking and doing. It’s fun to track the digital ejaculations of selected Twitterati. But a couple thousand people signed up unsolicited to follow my tweets. And I feel guilty when not serving this hungry crowd—remorseful when I am.

Since I don’t know many in this mob, I try not to be personally revealing. Still, no matter how innocuous your individual tweets, the aggregate ends up being the foundation of a scary-deep self-portrait. It’s like a psychographic version of strip poker—I’m disrobing, 140 characters at a time.

My feeling is that many people who are naturally less extroverted feel as if sharing is disrobing, that being public with what may have been private only a few years ago for many of us (and perhaps only a few days ago for the newbies) is unnerving and perhaps almost exhibitionistic.

The boundaries are moving for many. But if Levy wants to keep his private life private he can. He can post only the most banal observations, like ‘landed in Denver’ or ‘Who’s responsible for the Hawaiian music in elevators?” Carr can interpret sharing as arrogance or narcissism, if he wants.

But it’s not creepy. It’s simply people hanging out at the pub, gabbing with the owner of the neighborhood cafe, or playing cards at the barber shop.

However, we have had such a decline in those social spaces — Oldenburg’s Third Place — that we don’t even recognize it as natural and normal. We’ve spent our lives in our living rooms watching TV, so some don’t feel normal sitting around the campfire with our tribe, talking about the days hunt and our dreams for tomorrow. But for me, its natural, and it is for most of my pack, too.