See Me, Click Me

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)

He is a little worried about his parents learning things about him. But "if they want to find it on the Internet, it's there."

Where It Started

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You can trace the roots of publizenship back to cave painters, drawing stick-like pictures of themselves in pursuit of berries or bison or one another. Eventually artists discovered self-portraiture and patrons paid to have their faces plastered all over the place.

Living the out-in-the-open life picked up steam in the late 20th century. The 1960s were all about self-expression and sharing your inner self with the world at large. It was in a 1968 art catalogue that Andy Warhol predicted, "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes."

In the early 1970s, an everyday California family, the Louds, let TV cameras into their lives on "An American Family." The country watched in prime-time intensity as the family fell apart. In the 1970s, Tom Wolfe coined the phrase: "The Me Decade."

Technology -- tape recorders, amplifiers, cameras with shutter timers -- enabled publizens to open up even more. In the early 1980s, camcorders were introduced and folks could record their lives for all to see. The popular embracing of the Internet and the unfurling of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s allowed publizens to show off globally. In a pivotal move in the late 1990s, Web designer Jennifer Ringley set up a webcam in her Northwest Washington apartment and charged people an annual fee to watch her live her everyday life.

Reality TV shows multiplied like mice. And with the advent of Web logs in the late 1990s and MySpace in 2000, the Internet became a worldwide showcase for exhibitionists and voyeurs. People watching people watching people. MySpace, says spokesman Jeff Berman, has quickly "turned into a third place where people spend time." It's not home, it's not work, it's that other spot that Ray Oldenburg wrote about in "The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community."

And there is blogging. "The journal which is meant to be the epitome of genuine reflection and secrecy has become a proverbial loudspeaker with which millions announce their daily thoughts and secrets to the world," writes UCLA student Ed Chao in the online magazine Dynamic Tech. "Through the means of a massive network which we know as the world wide web, we have surrendered our privacy willingly all for the sake of being exciting or original."

Watch This, Big Brother

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You wonder why there was no marching in the streets when it was revealed that the National Security Agency has been monitoring telephone calls. People are worn down by companies tracking their every move, they are convinced that giving out privileged information might help combat terrorism and, as more and more people become publizens, they just don't care if other people eavesdrop. Fact is, they know others are listening.

"It is less and less reasonable for people to expect privacy," says Tim Sparapani, legislative counsel for privacy rights at the American Civil Liberties Union, "when people are willy-nilly putting private information into a public sphere where millions if not billions of people have access to it." He believes that there are still zones of privacy many people hold dear, but that those zones may be shrinking. And he warns that both the government and private corporations have a deep interest in gathering that private information and using it for their own interests.

Sherry Turkle of the MIT Media Lab shares some of Sparapani's concerns. The new generation of publizens, she says, understands that e-mail isn't really private and that cell conversation can be overheard, but "is not politically mobilizable around the issue of government intrusions on privacy."

Recently, Turkle attended the Webbys, an awards ceremony for Web sites. "I found a troubling sensibility that I see as widespread in the culture today: 'Wiretap me, I don't care. Listen to me, my life is transparent, I'm not doing anything wrong.' "

There seems to be little understanding, she says, of "the importance of the principle of privacy as a protection against authoritarianism." Publizens often operate with no historical sense, she says.