According to Jeff Jarvis, defenders of self-exposure on the Internet need all the support they can get. “I have learned that the more we share, the more we benefit from what others share,” he writes in “Public Parts.” “I am a public man. My life is this open book.” Jarvis has built up a speaking and consulting career as a sparring partner for privacy advocates, who he believes “swarm,” “fret” and “worry” too much about the dangers of personal exposure online. Styling himself an advocate of “publicness,” he has attracted attention by blogging in graphic detail about his successful treatment for prostate cancer. Now, in his second book, he offers himself as a model for citizens across the globe, promising to demonstrate how sharing on the Internet is “a means for real people to connect with one another.”
For a so-called “open book,” Jarvis is surprisingly selective in the personal details he reveals. We learn that he was proud to go on the Howard Stern show and to talk about his malfunctioning private parts. He also liked taking naked saunas at the World Economic Forum at Davos, especially after a reader of his blog recognized him in the nude. A German friend explains that Europeans are comfortable being naked in anonymous saunas because “no one knows who you are,” but Jarvis draws the opposite lesson. After “living online,” he says, “I found it was, indeed, no big deal to be naked in front of men and women, even people I knew.”
(Simon & Schuster) - ’Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live’ by Jeff Jarvis
There are many limits, however, to Jarvis’s willingness to lead a transparent life. He “won’t deny seeing porn” but refuses to share his browsing history. (“The problem is context: You may draw unwarranted conclusions about me that I’m not able to see and correct or explain,” he writes. That’s a concise definition of the value of privacy which Jarvis spends the rest of the book attacking.) He also refuses to disclose his total income and assets from teaching, blogging, writing and speaking. “Why? Even I’m not sure,” he says. “If I did, I’d be setting myself apart and people would wonder why.”In other words, he is happy to reveal personal details selectively when they serve his financial interests by creating an illusory bond with a faceless audience, but as soon as transparency threatens to embarrass him, he rediscovers the virtues of privacy.
It turns out that Jarvis is not an advocate of principled transparency at all, but merely an advocate for his own career. As a result, his personal revelations tell us nothing about what kind of person he really is. What does his wife think about his browsing Internet porn? How do his children feel about his vulgar descriptions of his private parts? In his acknowledgments, he thanks “my wonderful family” who “cope with the trials of living with a too-public husband and father,” but in the book itself we have no sense of what those trials actually are. Although he insists that “publicness builds relationships,” it’s hard not to wonder whether, in the case of his family, self-exposure has had the opposite effect. In the end, the generically prurient details that Jarvis blogs, tweets and broadcasts reveal nothing memorable or true about him as a husband or father: In his hunger to market himself to the crowd, he reduces himself to a slick abstraction.
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