Dan's New Blog

This morning, two outwardly disparate stories hit my feed reader. But taken together, they spoke to me about privacy in the digital age. I read this one first: A Recluse? Well, Not to His Neighbors. It was an amusing look back at J.S. Salinger’s relationship with his neighbors in Cornish, NH. To them, he wasn’t a crank — he was “just Jerry” — and they respected his need for privacy:

“‘Nobody conspired to keep his privacy, but everyone kept his privacy — otherwise he wouldn’t have stayed here all these years,’ said Sherry Boudro of nearby Windsor, Vt., who said her father, Paul Sayah, befriended Mr. Salinger in the 1970s. ‘This community saw him as a person, not just the author of “The Catcher in the Rye.” They respect him. He was an individual who just wanted to live his life.’ The curious constantly descended on Cornish and the surrounding area, asking residents for directions to Mr. Salinger’s house. Instead of finding the home, intelopers would end up on a wild goose chase. How far afield the directions went ‘depended on how arrogant they were,’ said Mike Ackerman, owner of the Cornish General Store. Mr. Salinger, he said, ‘was like the Batman icon. Everyone knew Batman existed, and everyone knows there’s a Batcave, but no one will tell you where it is.’”

(That’s exactly how Salinger was portrayed in Shoeless Joe, btw, the book upon which the movie Field of Dreams was based. And imho one of the best books ever written.)

Then I viewed the second post, which was a link to a video of Clay Shirkey’s talk, It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure. at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York in September 2008. Shirkey talks about the problems of managing privacy, which is essentially managing information flow, in today’s online environment. He gives us the example of a colleague who created a “self-inflicted privacy meltdown” when changing her relationship status on Facebook. Shirkey says it happened because managing online privacy preferences is an “unnatural act”. He points out that prior to the present era, only Greta Garbo — “I want to be alone” — had privacy preferences that worked.

To which I’d add J.D. Salinger. And those two kept their privacy simply by trusting a relatively small, *analog*, circle of people. Once you go digital, the filters will inevitably break (so says Shirkey) and it’s so much easier for information to escape. And then you become just like Ashton Kutcher.