Sir Ken Robinson on Creativity and Education

Private and Public in the Facebook World

What does it mean to be public in 2010? Where does does the public end and the private begin? Has social media really changed the definition of what it means to be public and private? Or has social media simply made more private things public to more people than was possible in the past?

Human nature changes very slowly (or has so far, at least by our understanding of time). Obviously Mark Zuckerberg (or someone's fatuous imitation of Mark Zuckerberg) was thinking hard about dollar signs and not human behavior when he said didn't believe in privacy.

Everyone believes in privacy, everyone needs privacy, or at least the sense of privacy, the sense that there is a part of this world that is one's own, if only for a moment. That need carves out an essential space within our society where people are able to be themselves, or whatever part of themselves they need to be in that moment. The philosopher Jurgen Habermas argues that this private space is necessary for the effective development of the public sphere. Without the ability to discourse in private, public voices tend too often to flit between the vacillating whims of public opinion. In other words, people become unmoored when they loose their privacy, or sense of it, and public governance is left without the constancy necessary for good decision-making that reasoned judgment provides.

So why is it any supprise that people are upset by Facebook's attempt to reveal their private selves without their permission? Facebook has become a fundamental institution of our social world providing a service that people might even pay for, the ability to connect and interact their entire social network with a click. But Facebook is not yet capable of changing our desire to have a private realm free from the intrusion of public attention. What media does is it changes your perspective on the world, how you see things, and people, as yet, don't want to see their world free of the bonds of propriety that the private realm provides.

To begin with....

Well, it's taken me a while to finally get going on this blog, but I'm going to take a more serious crack at actually writing regularly now that I'm fully healed and settled back into my life.

It can be hard to start writing though. Everyone has something to say, but it is a skill to be able to write or talk or express oneself in any kind of interesting manner consistently over any considerable period of time. The late David Foster Wallace wrote a great piece about a talk radio host, John Ziegler, for the Atlantic about five years ago. In it he makes the following point, which, with minor modifications can be applied to blogging or writing or really any form of human expression as well.

Hosting talk radio is an exotic, high-pressure gig that not many people are fit for, and being truly good at it requires skills so specialized that many of them don't have names. To appreciate these skills and some of the difficulties involved, you might wish to do an experiment. Try sitting alone in a room with a clock, turning on a tape recorder, and starting to speak into it. Speak about anything you want—with the proviso that your topic, and your opinions on it, must be of interest to some group of strangers who you imagine will be listening to the tape. Naturally, in order to be even minimally interesting, your remarks should be intelligible and their reasoning sequential—a listener will have to be able to follow the logic of what you're saying—which means that you will have to know enough about your topic to organize your statements in a coherent way. (But you cannot do much of this organizing beforehand; it has to occur at the same time you're speaking.) Plus, ideally, what you're saying should be not just comprehensible and interesting but compelling, stimulating, which means that your remarks have to provoke and sustain some kind of emotional reaction in the listeners, which in turn will require you to construct some kind of identifiable persona for yourself—your comments will need to strike the listener as coming from an actual human being, someone with a real personality and real feelings about whatever it is you're discussing.

Producing content on its own is hard, and producing interesting content is harder still.

But the goal is to try, and I think that the act of trying to produce at least a daily post will be a useful exercise for me. If nothing else, it will help me clarify my thinking on the issues and topics I care about.

Maybe Why I'm Doing This?

I've recently had a bit of a medical scare, and I'm still not out of the woods yet. I have a blood clot in my right shoulder. I have none of the normal risk factors for a blood clot; I'm healthy, I exercise, I eat pretty well, I don't smoke, I have no family history of blood clots, and I haven't had any surgeries or major injuries. What I do have is Paget-Schroetter disease. It means that the little hole where my artery, vein, and nerve go from my neck to my arm is tighter than normal (this occurs in 15-20% 0f people) and by leading an active life I've managed to irritate the subclavian vein, which runs through my shoulder, enough to cause a blood clot to form in my shoulder in what seemed a random fate at first.

This is a very rare disease, something that occurs in maybe 1 out of every 50,000 people. The fact that this has happened to me at what is normally a relatively care-free time in a person's life has given me a lot of pause. While I believe the treatment my doctors are prescribing, which includes several invasive procedures and steady doses of blood-thinners, should hopefully get me healthy again, I can't shake the feeling of my own mortality. Life is terribly unexpected, and I need to start living it with more urgency. I've always loved to write, I've always loved to discuss. This is my attempt to live what I love.