I love the first day of the year, probably because it’s the one day I really give myself permission to do nothing. It’s a good day for thinking. I’m home with a loved one and so many others. It wasn’t always this way. Intimacy used to be isolated. Private was private, which usually meant being at home with loved ones or at least in a place that wasn’t really open to “everyone else.” Depending on your perspective, this cocoon-like privacy was a refuge or a prison–for better or for worse, separated from public life. But the cocoon has now morphed into a hive, in which we are co-present with intimates and with people we know less well.
Of course, earlier forms of communication brought the outside in, too–telephones, radio,TV–but those influences and interruptions of private life were bush-leaguers compared to the digital teams that bring us fast, cheap, powerful, and communications that are on 24/7. Now, everyone you know can be “at home” with you, carrying on conversations and slinging one-liners via email and in messages, posts and tweets. And with them comes information from the outside–about products, ideas, and other people’s personal lives. In the last five years with the explosion of social network sites, the childhood game of show-me-yours-I’ll-show-you-mine has reached unimaginable proportions. Depending on the size of your personal network–your social convoy–we can peek into the lives of hundreds or thousands. They’re our relatives, our chose intimate, our more casual acquaintances, and strangers who happen to cross our paths in cyberspace. We know their likes and dislikes, their truimph and despair, their advice, their antics, their other friends.
As this decade ends, I can’t help wonder where this blending of the public and private will take us–and what it means to each of us and to our relationships to be so connected. The urge to connect is as old as living things. And technology has always furthered connection, but these affordances, as Barry Wellman, calls the various gadgets, systems, and software that allow us to connect, have put us in each other’s lives in a new, more intimate and intense way. No longer just consumers, we are all producers and creators. This shift has already changed us and our relationships, how we trust and do business, how we do good and do evil, where we put our energies. Where will we go from here? I’m writing an article now for the Pschotherapy Newsletter “* and I’d welcome your musing on this subject.
* A great magazine that you should know if you don’t already–it won the 2009 Independent Press Award given by the Utne Reader)
