New York magazine has an interesting article about changing attitudes to privacy, describing it as the greatest generation gap since Rock and Roll.
As someone straddling this new gap, almost too young for Generation X but too old for the kids these days and whatever they call their crazy newfangled advertising demographic, this rings true. There’s no such thing as privacy in any absolute sense, and it’s just as reasonable to live in a culture that embraces this idea as one that fights it. And there does seem to be a generational change from the latter to the former.
I wonder how radical a change it is, though. People living in private dwellings in large cities have a lot of control over what others know about them. But this way of life has only become common in the last few generations. The normal human social arrangement been small bands of hunter-gatherers, in which there was virtually no privacy for anybody. Other experiences, such as living in villages and small towns, have been somewhere in-between.
So perhaps the deliberate removal of privacy is really a conservative re-assertion of a traditional way of life. At the moment, we have privacy because people can’t easily know who we are just by seeing us going about our daily business. If you value being understood more than you value privacy, you have to make an effort to let people know who you are.