Qotw6: Privacy = kiss and tell?
I used to keep a handwritten diary and wrote most of my private thoughts in that book. To me, inner thoughts and opinions are meant to be private and not be shared among other people. Ever since the appearance of blogs, my views changed.
I treated the blog as something personal and surprisingly I am not against the idea of sharing my thoughts online to anyone anymore. It became a place for me to vent my displeasures and stress, just like my old private diary. Have I forgotten about the issue on privacy and felt that it is fine for strangers to read my personal life?
What is privacy?
According to wikipedia, "Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to keep their lives and personal affairs out of public view, or to
control the flow of information about them. “ It is somehow related to anonymity as people may want to remain nameless so as not to reveal one’s real identity.” Privacy can be seen as an aspect of security—one in which trade-offs between the interests of one group and another can become particularly clear.”(Privacy, 2007) With relations to the internet, it is now very easy for one to reveal information about you by looking at one’s history or even checking a person’s IP address to know one’s real identity. There is no real privacy in the internet world. According to psychologists, “it’s important to reveal yourself to friends, family and lovers in stages, at appropriate times. But few boundaries remain. The digital bread crumbs you leave everywhere make it easy for strangers to reconstruct who you are, where you are and what you like.” In some cases, by just reading a blog post can reveal what you think. We are living in a world that is hard to keep a real secret. (Sullivan Bob, 2006)
Exposing myself
As mentioned earlier, I shared my thoughts, interests and even pictures of my personal life in my blog. It became a daily routine for me and I felt all right exposing myself to the whole public domain, including strangers. Well, I am definitely not the odd one out. Many citizens now do not feel embarrassed or uneasy to share their lives and pictures. It is a norm now to actually share personal information about yourself all over the net; it increases intimacy between people as your friends or strangers will be able to know something about you through your personal blog. I even have long lost friends who found my blog and we connected each other by just blog viewing. However, the bad point about exposing yourself online may also affect your offline relationship between people. A couple may no longer communicate properly as they can just view each other's blog to know their inner thoughts. Not only that, the rest of the world is able to know how you think as well and that depicts the purpose of having a real soul mate. (Rosen Jeffrey, 2004)
An example of my own blog with my thoughts and pictures.
To trust or not to trust is the question
We are living in the era where most people are open about their lives and self disclosed. But does that mean that all of them have forgotten about privacy? When a person blogs, I am sure that most of the people are still aware that this is a public domain and will be somehow careful about what they reveal. The online environment enables one to be able to create their online identity and of course their own characters. A blogger may avoid talking about negative things and try to create a positive outlook of them. One can control what they write in their blog and what they want to reveal in the end. There may be some authenticity in the blog content but definitely not all are true. Another problem of revealing private thoughts would be that the truth may hurts. I had friends who encountered incident of reading other friends' blog and found out that they wrote something nasty or impolite about them. Their friendship was destroyed right after the blog incident. As the blog is part of the public domain and everyone is free to express themselves, some people may then straightforwardly wrote down how they felt about things and whom they dislike. Being too honest may cause more misunderstandings to happen and relationships to drift away. I guess some issues are better to be kept within you as sometimes the truth hurts.
Conclusion
The issue on privacy online is controversial. People gladly expose themselves through blogs but it is important to note that not all thoughts and issues can be openly discussed. It is still important to protect one's privacy.
Reference
Privacy (7 March 2007). In Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved on March 8, 2007 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy#Internet_privacy
The Naked crowd (19 July 2004).Rosen Jeffrey. Retrieved on March 8, 2007 from http://www.spiked-online.com/Printable/0000000CA5FF.htm
Privacy lost: Does anybody care? (17 Oct 2006). Sullivan Bob. Retrieved on March 8, 2007 from http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15221095/print/1/displaymode/1098/
