After all, most of us voluntarily give out our phone number and address when we allow ourselves to be listed in the White Pages. Most of us go a lot further than that. We register our whereabouts whenever we put a bank card in an ATM machine or drive through an E-Z Pass lane on the highway. We make public our interests and our purchasing habits every time we shop by mail order or visit a commercial Website. Popular culture shines its klieg lights on the most intimate corners of our lives, and most of us play right along.
Memoirs top the best-seller lists, with books about incest and insanity and illness leading the way.
Perfect strangers at cocktail parties tell me the most disturbing details of their abusive upbringings. She believes our culture is undergoing a kind of mass identity crisis, trying to hang on to a sense of privacy and intimacy in a global village of tens of millions. If things seem crazy now, think how much crazier they will be when everybody is as wired as I am. We're in the midst of a global interconnection that is happening much faster than electrification did a century ago and is expected to have consequences at least as profound. Small-scale privacy atrocities take place every day.