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Saturday, April 15, 2006

Self Revelation Is Bad. ?

Big Brother, We Hardly Knew Ye

"Privacy, as an issue, wasn't stirring much passion in the land.

In the land of manic attention-getters, which is what the country's become in the age of American Idol, Oprah, and nonstop self-revelation on the Web. Consider the wild growth of MySpace. Com, a service that grants all who use it at least the hope of obtaining an audience for their biographies. The personal secrets that people broadcast on this and other websites far outstrip, in intrusive depth and detail, anything the government is capable of gathering. Users cough up, without ever being asked, and for the benefit of perfect strangers, every last sexual quirk, obsessive thought and grandiose fantasy that they can render in words. And then they add pictures. Sometimes naked pictures. They spill their souls onto the Web as though trying to purge themselves of loneliness through exhibitionism."

One imagines that the writer is just offended by the idea of the unwashed masses revealing themselves. And lonely? Those kids on MySpace are exuberantly sociable.