By Linton Weeks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 23, 2006; D01
Google Dave Feinman.
Go ahead. Really. He wants you to.
Type his name as one word and you will soon know a lot about him -- through his home page and blog on MySpace.com and the Web site that bears his name. He's 27, engaged, Jewish, a Gemini and graduate student at the University of Central Florida who likes Beavis and Butt-head. In a few days, he will be moving to Washington to intern in the office of Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.). Coincidentally, Wexler's office is the subject of a TV documentary series that premieres in August.
"I don't put anything on MySpace that I wouldn't say to the face of anyone I meet," says Feinman. He says the Internet is "a very good way to express my feelings about politics or personal things."
Feinman is a primo example of an emerging archetype: the very public citizen. A publizen.
Though publizens are all ages and both sexes, they are predominantly young -- members of Generation Xtrovert. The recently released Pew Internet & American Life Project survey points out that more than half of the Internet's 12 million bloggers are under the age of 30.
In varying degrees, publizens grow up, fall in love, choose a college, drink too much, do good deeds, experiment with drugs and sex and kinky hairstyles, sit for tattoos, create art, enter 12-step programs, get hitched, give birth, go to work, file for divorce, die and do just about everything else in public. They build Web sites, produce blogs and star in reality television shows. They use new technologies to live in plain sight and newer technologies -- fancier phones, Web cams, digital video programs -- are being created so they can do just that.
Publizens welcome the klieg lights -- the glare, the heat, the exposure. British papers reported recently that Marie Osmond's teenage daughter Jessica put up a MySpace page revealing her sexual proclivities and listing Adolf Hitler as a hero. Young people have been kicked out of college for exhibiting pictures of themselves carousing.
People have given up on discretion. How else can you explain the unabashed Metro rider yakking about the most intimate details of her life on her cell phone? The endless erectile dysfunction advertisements on television? Why else would there be very personal videotapes online for all the world to see?
Tens of thousands of applicants have applied to live on camera in reality shows.
"This generation wants to be known, they want to be famous," Chris DeWolfe, a cofounder of MySpace.com recently told Vanity Fair. "This generation is self-involved, but they're also self-aware."
Don't these people understand the value of privacy?
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.
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 SchmoIngrid 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.
She posts interviews she has given from when she starred in "Joe Schmo 2," a 2004 reality TV show, on the Internet. Writing as Jane Schmo, she puts her observations about dating, growing up and being on television on her blog, http://popculturecasualty.blogspot.com/ . She is at once funny and befuddling on her Friendster page, pointing out that she meticulously keeps menus from restaurants where she has eaten and sometimes hides gossip magazines in copies of the Wall Street Journal.
For Wiese, living a public life and having people respond to it is a natural thing. Many of her friends and family members are on Friendster or MySpace. Her sister, her mother and one of her brothers have blogs. She says, "It's just what we do."
She gets 200 to 300 hits a day on her blog. People are watching her life unfold. Men she meets through Friendster often know more about her than some of her offline friends do. She said it's kind of cool to know a guy has read "all my scary dating stories and still wanted to go out with me."
There is, Wiese says, "a certain narcissism in people who choose to live their private lives in the public. I see a lot of people get caught up in it."
Joseph Argabrite, a 23-year-old graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, is just getting caught up in this whole public life thing. And he's liking it. Today he's shopping for his father at Fashion Centre at Pentagon City and talking about going public. He's wearing a yellow polo shirt, blue jeans and black wristband signifying that he didn't vote for George W. Bush last time around. He carries a book bag with a blogger's tools of the trade: a journal, a digital camera, reading glasses.
He grew up in Radford, Va., and he goes back on occasion. But his life now is in Richmond, in Washington on certain weekends, and on his MySpace page. His blog includes some cursing, his rules for drinking and several mildly outrageous photographs, including one of three boys and a girl showing off their white underwear. He is aware that a future employer might see his site, but he doesn't care too much. He puts the stuff up anyway.
He wants to work with the government or for a nongovernmental agency on policy issues. "I have lots of friends who put lots of sordid details of their lives on the Internet," he says.
Argabrite finds solace in going public. "It's therapeutic," he says. "It's like talking to someone."
And because readers respond, he says, "I know someone is listening. I don't have to pay huge therapist bills."
He says, "Sometimes I put things up just for shock value."
His home page photo: Deborah Harry of Blondie, peeking voyeuristically through a Venetian blind as if she is watching something taboo.
"Sometimes you put up pictures of yourself half-clothed and see how many people want to become your friends," he says. The more provocative the photos, the more people visit his site, he says. "I always wanted to be on the 'Real World.' "
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 StartedYou 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 BrotherYou 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.
Though publizens are aware of diminished privacy in this post-Sept. 11 world, many don't see it as a sacrifice. Living publicly makes certain things easier -- storing information on someone else's server, using a credit card, meeting others.
For people such as Harlan J. Onsrud, a professor of spatial information at the University of Maine at Orono who has studied privacy issues, increased public exposure can even increase personal security. "I have put my picture on the Web. It enhances my security instead of detracting from it." When someone tries to cash a check with his name on it, Onsrud says, it will be very easy for the bank to know what Onsrud looks like.
The Inner CelebrityThese days it's hard not to live a public life. "It's far more difficult to secure your privacy than not to secure your privacy," Onsrud says. "You often don't have the choice in this technological world."
He adds, "I'm always astounded about what people talk about in public."
Perhaps letting it all hang out in public has a flip side, says Lynne Layton, professor of psychology at Harvard. "There's not much else behind the surface, she says. "With all the running around that we all do all day and night, with the way middle class kids are scheduled, are we perhaps killing off the capacity to have an inner life?"
Kevin Kelly, a founding editor of Wired magazine, says that privacy is an illusion. "We've always been very public as a species." he says. "The very notion of privacy is recent, and probably temporary. Big Brother is a type of paranoia and egoism, because in fact most lives are not worth watching. With technology we are only returning to the global village where everyone knows what everyone else is doing."
Cultural anthropologist Danah Boyd says living a public life can be a healthy undertaking. In this culture of fear, "it is critical for young people to have some exposure to public life, to strangers," she says. "You need this to grow up."
Publizens like Dave Feinman, Ingrid Wiese and Joseph Argabrite thrive on the responses to their public lives. The exterior life for many is as important as, if not more important than, the interior life.
Signing on to star in a reality TV show like "Real World" or "Joe Schmo," "is about choosing to become a celebrity," Boyd says. "And the Internet looks a lot like a reality television show."
So everybody is famous, everyone is a public figure. And every life is lived out in the open. Which changes a lot of things. Libel lawyers may find it harder to determine just who is a public figure and who is not. There soon could be more people in reality TV shows than watching them. The Hollywood celebrity hierarchy could topple as the Ingrid Wieses become just as recognizable as the Angelina Jolies. And there could be a general sense spreading across the land that if it doesn't happen in public, it doesn't really happen.