Welcome.
I've started this space as a way to try to generate a conversation. What do we consider public? What do we consider private? Are 'private' things the same as 'personal' stuff? What's political--can anything be?
I have to be honest and say that I'm in the middle of a PhD for which I'm studying identity as public and/or private. I spend a lot of time reading, writing and theorizing, and soon I'll be interviewing actual people (yey!) about what they think, but there is some doubt as to how much of a 'public space' the internet really can be, so I thought I'd check it out this way--let's call it testing my own assumptions.
Comments are not only welcome, but absolutely necessary. If no one writes, nothing happens because, believe me, I'm not here to go on and on into a silent void :). I want to know if people actually access blogs, if they use them, how they use them, if they think of them in the same way they'd consider a coffeeshop or other public venue in which they interact with people...what sort of stuff do people share on blogs...if they're sharing their whole lives in a forum like this, is there any difference between what is private or personal and what is public?
About Me
- B
- I'm a 33 year old American PhD student in the UK, researching the experience of Muslims in Britain. I'm writing this blog as an experiment within that project--trying to start a conversation about academia, social science research of minorities and life as it happens along the way.
3 comments:
I don't think that the nature of the forum has any bearing on the the private/public dynamic - people will still only make public the amount of information that they wish to reveal, all that changes by using a blog, or other social networking site, is the size of the audience for the information revealed.
I imagine that communication theory would shed light on this issue. I'm not too versed in such theory, but it seems that private moves to public through a series of concentric circles, with what you think in your own head (and do when by yourself) being the most private (the center of the circle) and then what you do when out in the open being the most public (the outer circles). This probably applies to on-line forums, too. I can be private on an anonymous blog, and then private-public in front of my selected audience on FB, and then completely public on my professional organization's listserve.
Both your comments are really interesting, thanks.
The origins of 'public', etymologically, are actually very much rooted in forum style, coming from the 17th and 18th century salons and coffeehouses of western Europe (most notably Britain). While the content of what was shared was occasionally personal, the point of the meetings was to discuss first art and literature (only recently liberated from sole jurisdiction of the nobility/royalty) and then to discuss politics, growing to become a forum for critical-rational debate about matters of the state. This is, in part, how our western notion of democracy has evolved as participatory and critical.
As for communication theor(ies), I tend in my own research and perspectives to be less interested in psychological investigations (to which communication theory speaks). I'm much more interested in issues of public and private as functions of our social and political world. I like the mention of concentric circles and the variations of exposure, so to speak, they are used to describe. That analogy is not unlike Hannah Arendt's take on publicity, with its light necessarily coming into our darkest, most private existence to make certain things open and exposed (public).
Moving beyond the 'nature' of either public or private, I'd like to think out-loud about two questions:
1) The terms 'public' and 'private' are nearly taken for granted, in meaning and in usage. But, how do those terms function for us? What I mean is--how do we as individuals think of public and private? And how do technologies such as the internet function within that dichotomy?
2) More specifically, where is the public-private dichotomy in matters of religious public identity--when there are religious identities such as 'British Muslim' or 'Muslim American' established in 'the public' ? Does that say anything about the 'public/private' underpinnings of liberalism or does it speak to something else...?
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