1998-09-06
Privacy and Personality
If you check out this website--
http://www.anacam.com/anaframesg.html
you will see real live pictures of Ana Voogt, an artist in Minnesota, living her life. This is the Anacam. A camera takes pictures every 240 seconds or so and then feeds it to the Internet.
When I grew up, you would sometimes see a documentary on tv that claimed to show you someone's real life. They followed him or her around at home, showed them eating, drinking, chatting with friends... and it was all completely phony. Even a child knew that this was all staged. For one thing, you couldn't pick up these images with a television camera without a huge bank of lights taking up most of the living room. Everybody in the room certainly knew they were on tv. For another thing, you never saw anybody get undressed or go to the bathroom or pick his nose. Of course, that's what you really wanted to see. More importantly, the program was never live. It was always taped or filmed first and then edited.
Last year, "The Truman Show" claimed to be about a man whose entire life is broadcast on tv, without his knowledge. But this movie didn't show any of those real, personal activities that you think about when you think about the idea of watching a person live his life without him knowing about it.
The Anacam does. Well, it's still selective, because you only see what Ana wants to show you, but Ana is far more willing to let you see everything than Truman was. And the Anacam exists in real time: no editing, no condensation, no cheating. I haven't seen it myself, but I know that she has even taken her webcam into the shower. Is this pornography? I don't think so. I'm not sure. I don't think she's out to titillate the viewer, but, on the other hand, she probably wants to attract as much attention as possible. Ana is an "artist".
This is something to think about. How valuable is your privacy? We used to think that privacy was extremely valuable. But that was largely because privacy was so hard to violate. People you hardly knew wouldn't let you come into their bathrooms to watch them go pee and pop a pimple. Well, at least not for the past 100 years. I have a feeling that there was a lot less privacy in the Middle Ages. For one thing, when you went to a hotel in the Middle Ages, everybody slept in the same big bed. I kid you not. You can look it up. And people tossed their garbage right out the window onto the street. People did not have bathrooms or even outhouses. So I don't think there was very much privacy. Read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
Why did this change? Think of the Victorian era in England. Suddenly, everybody wanted to hide anything to do with sexual identity. Women wore big, billowing skirts, with layers of undergarments. Bathing suits were big enough to camp in. Men wore long pants, jackets, and hats. Why did people suddenly become obsessed with keeping their privates private? A wave of piety and religion? No. How about this: privacy was valuable because it was rare.
Then more and more people acquired their own homes, with outhouses. They lived separately, as families, rather than communally with the entire clan. Clothes became cheaper to make. More and more people could afford to wear different clothes on different days. The hardworking bourgeoisie developed habits of thrift and restraint, and one of the things they wanted to restrain was their bodily functions.
Let's jump into the mid 20th century: everybody's moving out of apartments (at least, in North America) into private bungalows in the suburbs. At last they've got it: privacy. Nobody can even hear you through the walls.
Today, privacy is no longer valuable. What is the value of something that everybody has? Zilch. Why are the social and sexual values of the "third world" so much more conservative than those in Europe and North America? Because their "social economy", the balance of scarcity and abundance of social values, favours privacy. Privacy hardly exists, so it is very valuable to them.
So why does Ana Voogt let the world into her living room, her kitchen, her bathroom? Because privacy is so easy to obtain, that it's no longer as valuable to her as other things, like, say, her desire to succeed as an artist.
Perhaps that's also why fashions have changed so much. It's the economy of sexual relationships. Until the 1950's, it was in the woman's best interest to be married to one man, who would provide everything for her until the day she died. A prospective husband would want to make sure that the woman he married would be loyal to him for life. So any indications that she could be available to other men would doom her. She could become a poor spinster, or be forced into prostitution to make a living. Thus, it was not economical for her to appear to be available, even if only for visual ravishment, to a large number of males.
It used to be uneconomical for a woman to be available for visual ravishment by a large number of males. Marriage was different, because social conditions were different. People were less mobile, less prosperous, less flexible. Marriage was for life as much for economic reasons as for moral reasons.
What happened? Why did the mini-skirt appear? Why so many people "shack-up" nowadays, rather than get married first?
What has happened to our society is prosperity. What has happened is that women now are able to earn a living independent of men. What has happened is that our society has adjusted. With the abundance of wealth, privacy, health, and mobility, people are probably actually behaving pretty well the way they've always wanted to behave, seeking some kind of emotional fulfillment in relationships, and leaving the relationship if it isn't there.
We are going to know more and more about ourselves. We are going to watch people live their lives (just wait until the Internet improves to the point where we can have efficient, live streaming video and audio!). It will be a strange knowledge for many of us because we will have never seen these things before. We are going to realize how similar we all are. We all fart, belch, pick our noses, scratch where it itches... we're just not used to not pretending that we don't. Once we know that everybody does it, we may have a healthier knowledge of ourselves, and greater acceptance of our own fleshy existences.
Of course, many fundamentalists Christians have a different explanation for all this new behaviour. They call it moral decay. I have never bought that. I have just never believed that we are behaving a whole lot worse than our ancestors behaved, or wanted to behave.
I also have a broader definition of what is "moral". The fundamentalists, and the American people in general, seem to consider sexual sin to be way, way more important than greed, materialism, or exploitation. What gets you more upset? A man and woman having a consensual sexual relationship outside of marriage, or a society that decides that we are going to turf welfare mothers and their babies so we can all afford a second VCR? Condoms or military aircraft? Swearing or forcing governments in Africa and Central America to close their hospitals before they receive aid from the IMF? Sorry, James Dobson. I think it's way more important to save human lives and prevent physical suffering than it is to stop sex between consenting adults. Why don't you take your $185 million a year and feed the hungry, instead of lobbying against same-sex benefits at the Disney Corporation.
© Copyright 1998 Bill Van Dyk