At 9 a.m. on a Thursday morning, I sat in a stuffy lecture hall and stared bleary-eyed at the first question on my American history midterm: "'The Federalists have been given a bum rap by historians; they were all good republicans.' Comment." Instead of thinking about my essay, I found myself considering the essay prompt's colloquial tone.
Perhaps the teaching assistant who wrote the question assumed he'd be endearing himself personally to his young, hip student audience. But by appealing to students as a private individual rather than as a professional and an academic, wasn't he crossing a public-personal divide? Or has that line been so effaced that it's no longer discernable?
In the era of the Federalists, political discourse belonged to the social elite that was educated enough to access the printed media where political dialogue occurred. When leaders wrote on public matters, they made it clear that their leadership came from their position outside and above the masses, a status that allowed them to confront, critique and lead.
In a recent column, Michal Zapendowski '07 argued that the malaise of our political and artistic world is an inability to confront audiences directly ("This is not a colum," March 22). He noted that museums are now filled with objects that might be trash if found on the street. He called today's political activism "fake confrontation" because it fails to directly engage the groups whose opinions it seeks to change. Students lying on the Main Green to protest deaths in Iraq, he argued, were having a discourse amongst themselves instead of engaging the public.
Perhaps the trends Zapendowski identifies have less to do with a refusal of activists to engage the establishment directly and more to do with the age they live in. To stand outside the political establishment or the artistic world and openly, actively engage with it as an individual seems impossible when private and the public are intertwined.
Remember during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal when apologists for the president protested that he could not be held publicly and professionally accountable for his private life? The argument had a hard time hitting home, mostly because the notion of separating a single individual into private and public seemed out of sync with a world in which private lives are public information and participation in public discourse is increasingly personalized. Political commentators routinely cite the emphasis placed on personal qualities of political leaders in determining electoral success.
While this intertwining is a long historical process, the last two decades have seen its rapid acceleration. With the Internet, private information can be publicly accessed, often in dangerous ways. Private communication takes place in a language even more informal than our everyday speech, where spelling becomes phonetic shorthand and phrases are replaced by acronyms.
The printed word, formerly considered distinctive for its public nature, is also accessible over the Internet - what newspaper does not post its stories online? In fact, the Internet is rapidly becoming the only place we turn for written words, and on the Internet we can personalize even the news of the external world to suit our private interests. We can access and come to know as true a personally crafted reality.
The metaphor of a "web" is often used to describe the Internet technology upon which our new public discourse is based. Rather than inhabiting a world of private individuals for whom the public reality is something external that can be examined,and "confronted" directly, our public reality is itself the intertwining of individuals.
Artists or political activists thus justify confrontation only amongst themselves as public action because they are touching some point on the web of our cyber-reality. If public and private discourses are disseminated through identical means, how can we distinguish between them? And if we can't distinguish between public and private discourses, how can we make distinctions between the personal and the social in politics or art?
By the logic of our new undivided discourse, their arguments appear valid, but they are troubling for those, like myself, who value a more active and responsible kind of interaction among individuals. Must the effacement of the divide between public and private necessarily condone the kind of "fake confrontation" or "trash-as-art" which Zapendowski rightly identifies as serious challenges that contemporary politics and art must overcome?
Though I am an optimistic fan of the Internet and its ability to disseminate information to involve more people in political or artistic debate, I cannot accept political bloggers who include what they ate for breakfast or their personal photos in a post. I side with the many professors from colleges across America who told the Chronicle of Higher Education earlier this year that e-mail inspires students to share personal details with professors that should be left out of public, academic life.
Our new modes of communication and information, if wielded responsibly, have the power to elevate our discourse above the need for such a divide. Instead of allowing public discourse to become a dumping ground for every private thought, is it possible that we as individuals in an age without privacy can learn to think and speak in a manner worthy of the publicity we now have access to? If we don't, the Internet, and the public culture of our time, may earn their own "bum raps" in the history books.
Maha Atal '08 is wary of Web cams.
