This week’s On Culture is a conversation between Trey Herweck and me about privacy and our public selves and how they relate. It uses the latest piece from The Embassy as the jumping off point. Here is an excerpt …
Even though it is something I feel called to, it is a strange thing, not ever being a professional writer, to send these things off to people I don’t know. And, perhaps because of that, I want these private thoughts to make an imprint out there, with you - and, in so doing, are they no longer private? And, what impact does all of that have on me? (A not very private question to raise, but I hope you might consider the question, as it may be appropriate for you.)
How much is the technologically enabled drive to go public with our lives - a public that is now global - reshaping how we understand ourselves? Reshaping the moral landscape of our interior lives, our psychological incentives, the very definition and experience of being a person? … Have we ceased believing that something of value might lie outside what other people can know and articulate about us, beyond what we can even know about ourselves?
Anne Snyder, Seen and Unseen, Comment Magazine, Spring 2025
Have you ever seen one of those social media videos that are posted because they are really embarrassing to someone - they make the subject look stupid, weak, scared, awkward? And have you ever noticed that many of these videos appear to be posted to the account of the person who is the subject of these videos?
I also take it for granted that the greatest threat to privacy is not prying eyes, so much as our own desire to be pried into.
Anton Barba-Kay, Keep it Private, Comment Magazine, Spring 2025
Now, of course, these videos may be fake. But I think that makes the point even more clearly. We seem to live in an age where exposure, being noticed by others, is its own currency. And while I don’t think that any of you would do such a thing, such things impact us. While we value our privacy, many of us, culturally, seem to assess our value (at least partly) via exposure - whether by likes and clicks and hearts or by other ways we present ourselves to the world or to ourselves. I rarely post on social media - in fact, almost all my posts are links to this newsletter to let people know it is out there … which, back to the contradiction. I am part of the attention economy even as I analyze it. That, as I have written many times before, is how culture works - we can analyze it, but we should remember we are a part of it, even the parts we don’t want to think we are a part of. It leads me to consider (after having to admit it to myself) why I check to see if anyone has liked or shared or subscribed. It isn’t for the money - I make enough to cover the costs of my website and to help me do some consulting and coaching for churches and leaders who can’t really pay market rates for these services. (Why am I telling you this?) Anyway, it isn’t about the money. I want it because at least part of me wants the affirmation. Does that change anything about what I write? I don’t think so (see above). But it is a question I should ask myself.
There are two basic wishes at play in all our privacies: the desire for solitude and the desire for society. We wish to be left alone, but it is hell to be alone. We wish to break the spell of solitude, but hell is other people. Digital technology promises to resolve this problem by affording us both … But instead of both, we get neither.
Anton Barba-Kay, Keep it Private, Comment Magazine, Spring 2025
All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room, alone.
Blaise Pascal, 1654
I am using this newsletter and social media more broadly as examples, but I am also thinking about the larger cultural impulse to present a curated picture of ourselves to the world, even to those we know and love, without thinking about it. We seek to present this to ourselves also, for our own approval. The perfect vacation, the perfect wedding, family, anniversary. The gleaming career, the wonderful house, the latest fashion. Many people, not all, but many, bought a certain electric car because it communicated what they considered to be the right things about the kind of person they wanted to be seen as. Some people, not all, cheered when those cars were torched when the message those cars delivered to the world changed. Some of that second group of people are also in the first group of people. The car is more than a car - it is a statement in a different package. Even statements about privacy are statements to send out publicly (I guess like this one? or from a writer I like below). I think most of this happens under the surface, beyond our personal reflection.
Read the whole piece here.
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