Does Anyone Still Have a Private Life?

There was an interesting article in the New York Times a couple of days ago looking at how the Internet is eroding the lines between our public and private lives.

With Facebook, Twitter, blogs, Flickr, YouTube et al, many people are more than happy to publicly share the details of their lives – what they like to eat, where they travel, what they do for a living, their husbands/wives, their children, hobbies and interests, political allegiances, etc.

In other words, everything that used to be private is now publicly on display, which begs the question whether there’s anything still private.

Of course, it doesn’t help it’s increasingly difficult to keep private things from going public when portable devices such as cell phones and digital cameras make it so easy to record and publicly share anything. You do something stupid in public, and chances are someone will be uploading it to the Web in due course.

While I’ve led a fairly public life on the Internet given I’m been active on it since 1995, I’ve always been conscious about maintaining the line between public and private. I’ve always maintained the approach that there’s a happy balance between what you disclose to the world and what you keep to yourself or your family.

When people, for example, recount on the Web stories about their children – good and bad – I question whether everyone needs to know these details, and why people feel the need to share these things.

I recognize the Internet is an entity driving everything into the public realm. What troubles me is people are so willing to feed this public monster with no lack of details about their private worlds.

In the long run, I don’t think it’s a good thing that everyone knows everything about everybody. There are parts of your life that deserve to be private or, at least, public to a small group of friends and family.

Technorati Tags: social media, privacy