Known Citizen : A History of Privacy in Modern America (9780674985193) by Igo Sarah E

Author:Igo, Sarah E.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

8

Stories of One’s Self

Who knew that there were so many people with so many necessary things to say about themselves?

—BROCK CLARKE,

An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, 2007

On the cusp of the twentieth century, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis had hoped to rein in an aggressive media so as to sequester personal matters and images from general view, except in that limited band of cases that concerned “public men.” This was the only way, they argued, to protect the “inviolate personality” from newly intrusive forces in American society. Many in the decades that followed made similar claims for the necessity of privacy and of privacy rights in a democratic society. These claims accompanied anxious discussions of identification systems and psychological testing, reproductive decision making and welfare administration, electronic eavesdropping and computerized dossiers.

At the century’s end, however, a reversal appeared to be at hand. Something that commentators began to call “confessional culture” seemed to impel the very public airing of highly personal stories and what in another day would have been tightly concealed secrets.1 Unlike the forced disclosures of gay public figures or the calculated comments of politicians, these were voluntary utterances, willingly offered up. They did not carry an obvious public message or political intent. These confessions, instead, spoke to the heightened value of personal expression of all kinds. Americans, it seems, were actively seeking out new venues for self-revelation. As they did, shame in disclosing private matters seemed to tilt decisively toward shame in concealing who one really was.

The rise of a much-decried “confessional culture” appears at first glance like a fundamental discontinuity from the rights-oriented privacy talk of the 1960s, with its emphasis on protecting citizens from the gaze of others. How was it that some individuals had come to relish the prospect of making their own lives, not to mention the lives of others, an open book? To a remarkable degree, privacy discussions by the 1990s concerned not just the intrusions of authorities into private life but also the extrusion of private matters into public places. The flip side of the relentless exposure of prominent figures—President Bill Clinton’s sexual escapades the most sensational example—was ordinary citizens’ own quest for publicity: their voluntary divulgences of matters ranging from child abuse to drug addiction in confessional talk shows, tell-all memoirs, and reality television. What if we have met the privacy invaders, some critics implored, and they are us?

So it was that at the end of the twentieth century, journalists, corporations, and state authorities were joined by yet another set of actors seeming to imperil Americans’ privacy: willing exhibitionists, happy to dispense with the concept altogether as they foisted intimate details of their personal lives on strangers. Their unceasing urge to divulge provoked philosophers and social critics to issue dramatic pronouncements: that privacy was dead or dying or that “the destruction of privacy is the great collective project of our time.”2 The recent arrival of self-broadcasting genres such as blogging and social networking has only cemented the analysis.

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