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See Me, Click Me
Someone's Looking
"You are assuming," says Danah Boyd, a cultural anthropologist in the University of California at Berkeley's doctorate program, "that today's young people know privacy."
These days, Boyd points out, young people have little unstructured time where they can call the shots. When parents aren't hawk-watching their every move, school administrators, coaches, therapists, even the media are. The children of baby boomers have learned to do everything under watchful eyes.
  Joseph Argabrite would rather live a public life than a private one. "It's therapeutic. It's like talking to someone," he says. Ingrid Wiese says, "There is a lack of shame I have in sharing my personal life." But there is, she says, "a certain narcissism in people who choose to live their private lives in the public." (Photos By Linda Davidson -- The Washington Post) Save & Share |
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Check out the college photos at Webshots.com. That's where Bob Reno finds athletes behaving badly. Reno, 46, is the founder -- or as some of his readers call him, the "creep in charge" -- of BadJocks.com, a Web site dedicated to the stupidity and outrageousness of sports figures. In mid-May, BadJocks posted pictures of members of the Northwestern University women's soccer team in their underwear, kissing one another, performing lap dances for male students. The women's soccer program was suspended, the team's hazing rituals investigated, and individual punishments were meted out.
BadJocks regularly publishes such embarrassing pictures. After all, Reno says, someone posted the photos publicly in the first place. They want to be seen.
Working on a computer in Lansing, Mich., Reno launched the for-profit site in early 2000. Business, he says, is booming. "Public embarrassment has been the growth industry in the United States for the last few years," he says. "You've got a generation that is growing up with digital cameras and camera phones, and they are encouraging each other and being encouraged by popular media and by the technology companies to document everything they do." An ad for a Logitech QuickCam says you can "be the star of the show" with technology that "keeps your face in the center of the video frame" even though you are moving around. Another webcam encourages users to "share a smile with anyone, anywhere in the world."
Many publizens are not that concerned about the public persona they reveal to a potential friend or spouse or employer. Others are. They use a combination of old-fashioned discretion and Web site features that limit access to certain information. Users often have a false sense of security. You might post a compromising photo or an away message believing that only friends will see it. But there could always be someone sitting at your friend's elbow. Or your friend could pass along the embarrassing information with the click of a mouse.
"I'm a very serious person," says Dave Feinman. "I understand if I have a picture of me half-naked or drinking, that could ruin my prospects for the future."
He says that savvy publizens "participate in this public aspect of technology without compromising their future goals. I would say I am one of those people who take some care in it. And I'm probably in the minority."
Browse through MySpace, with its more than 80 million uses worldwide, or Facebook and you believe that many don't see anything strange about having their most shocking photos posted. "They just don't see that behavior as abnormal," Bob Reno says. People are uploading pictures and videos of activities that several years ago might have only been committed clandestinely at a strip club or bachelorette party.
It's gotten to the point, Reno says, that "people would rather be embarrassed publicly than ignored privately."
Jane Schmo
Ingrid Wiese is a publizen with a purpose.
"There is a lack of shame I have in sharing my personal life," says Wiese, a 32-year-old development consultant for nonprofit groups who divides her time among New York, Philadelphia and Washington. She is very blond with hazel eyes and on a recent afternoon she is wearing a brown suit, nude fishnets and mustard shoes. She is drinking bottled water at the Mudd House on M Street NW and doing one of the things she likes to do best: talking about her life.
