During the early days of the Internet, privacy was an absolute hot-button issue. Instead of using their real names, people used “handles”. The famous cartoon On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog ran in the New Yorker in 1993 and lampooned the prevailing ethos.
In this decade, as social networks have taken off like rockets, privacy has become much less important to the average netizen. People post embarrassing photos of themselves, and the trend is definitely toward the “who cares?” mentality.
Yet, my thought this morning is that overexposure is a myth – that the flat, temporal nature of the Wayback Machine can never hope to capture even a small percentage of all of the things that define who and what we are. We are all complicated, complex, and amazingly inconsistent creatures. There are places deep in the shrieking hollows of our psyche that no webcam can capture, no blog post can explain; things that are so elusive and inexplicable even to ourselves that they can’t be pinned down – the Heisenberg Principle of the unconscious mind.
That is not to say that, acting as a netizen, the goal shouldn’t remain the same – to be fully authentic, fully engaged with, and fully accessible to the communities you participate in – but there’s a sort of chicken-and-egg problem at work – if I am happy, I can express my authentic happiness; but later, if I am upset, I can express my authentic sadness and still be me – implying that authenticity is not a state of being, but a process, and a maddeningly unpredictable one. And in neither case do the terminal emotions of happiness or sadness really get to the root of who I am. They are manifestations, shadows on the cave wall.
We all lead complicated inner lives. We hardly know ourselves, so don’t worry about keeping yourself from exposing too much. Perhaps, in trying to explain at least a tiny slice of yourself to others, be it via blogging, social media, creative outlets, etc., you can better explain yourself to – yourself.
About nathan kaiser
