My fear isn’t that the Internet has enabled us to share our most private selves with an unknown public; nor is it that we’re constructing those meta-narratives on an hourly, even momentary basis. What I fear is that in doing so, and in championing the act as such, we are establishing a social imperative in which those who choose not to divulge—or to do so differently, or more slowly—are cast as social retrogrades.
Here’s a couple of lines from an essay I’ve been working on for some time, which considers the sense of “knowingness” that dominates social exchanges whose locus lies online. It’s also about privacy, and a simple struggle for communication between people. Furthermore, now that I think about it: material history and the passage of time. But I digress. Soon enough, for this one.
One more thing: Emily Keegin produced the image above. She, like many of us, is someone who manages to juggle the professional—photo editor by day—and the practical, as a studio photographer who uses her own image in her work. She gets it.
