Desiring Machine

What is our social bargain? New Media professor Clay Shirky raises some interesting questions on social networking.

These questions of privacy are not particularly new. In college I remember reading a fascinating book entitled
Confidence Men and Painted Women By Karen Halttunen. It explored the rise of the industrial city out of agrarian American society in the Victorian era. In particular it explored the role of transparency, sincerity and a crisis of authenticity that gripped urbanized life of the American Victorian era. In particular this crisis revolved around the betrayal of “confidence men” who could take advantage of the new cloak of anonymity offered them in urban life. Urban life offered a new mold where you could know nothing about about the many “strangers” who inhabited the world of the city. This was in contrast to traditional rural and agrarian society which tended to provide much tighter nit social arrangements and an almost total presentation of the self to the public.

Out of this new social arrangement of the city developed several norms of public and private spheres. The threshold of the home was a particularly potent locality for demarcating this separation.

From Karen Halttunen’s book:

The belief that women were naturally more sincere than men suggested that women might offer a solution to the problem of hypocrisy in American Society. But the domestic isolation that protected transparent women from the confidence man’s game also threatened to ensure their powerlessness over social relations outside the home. By definition the domestic sphere was closed off, hermetically sealed from the poisonous air of the world outside. Although domestic sincerity might offer some psychological compensation for the deceitfulness of public urban life, it could not resolve the problem of hypocrisy in the larger social world. Hypocrisy was a problem where men met as strangers; within the domestic circle, where family members were presumed to know one another intimately, the problem of hypocrisy lost much of its significance. Needed was a third social sphere, lying between the public world of strangers where sincerity was dangerous and the private family circle where the sincere ideal was virtually meaningless. This middle social sphere was found in the parlor.

The parlor was the front room of the middle-class home where friends, acquaintances, and carefully screened strangers met formally “in society.” Geographically, it lay between the urban street where strangers freely mingled and the back regions of the house where only family members were permitted to enter uninvited. Within the cult of domesticity, the parlor provided the woman of the house with a “cultural podium” from which she was to exert her moral influence over American Society. There she ruled as a kind of constitutional monarch whose responsibility was to enforce the hundreds of rules governing polite social intercourse. Central in this vast body of social legislation was the sentimental ideal of sincerity. Within the Victorian parlor sentimentalism was not a mere abstraction: it was a prescriptive norm that shaped all aspects of dress, etiquette, and social ritual.

What I find most amazing in this social order is the notion of a threshold, a boundary space between the public and private. Historically I think one could argue that this boundary has been a shifting and evolving norm. It always traverses a circuit of xenphobia, us vs. them, the inside and outside, whether we are talking about the home, the state, or any number of social institutions and practices that asserted any degree of “privacy” or secrets. From pillow talk to state secrets the ambition is the same. To demarcate difference and opposition that allows for a specific separation of specific modes of behavior, and personal identity.

What is interesting with the facebook phenomenon is not that it is new but that it represents a current fault point along the public/private divide. In the past society clung to geographical arrangements to determine these boundaries. In the 1960s Marshall McLuhan told us that “the new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village”. The world of the internet is a further collapsing of these geographical arrangements. In a very real sense the public world is expanding into every corner. Surveillance is not just a fantasy of the paranoiac, it is a social given. The only question that remains is how society adapts to these norms. What is the social bargin? Do we accept the notion of a private life? Or does this notion of private become so radical that it is perceived as a fundamental threat to society? These are all weighty questions and I don’t pretend to hold the answer to them. All that I know is that social networks like facebook provides an opportunity to hasten our discovery of how these questions will be answered, and heighten the urgency with which to answer them.