satyadasa

Another half week is over (my work shifts on Tuesday and Wednesday nights). I would love to hide in my basement apartment, to read, write, and sleep until I have to leave for class in the late afternoon. But I have books to read that I haven't acquired and cannot yet afford to buy – until soon-coming paycheck / student loan direct deposit. Fortunately I live 6 express stops away from one of the planet's best research libraries. I'll be there at 10 I hope.

Once again, the cover article in New York magazine is actually interesting.

Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy: The Greatest Generation Gap Since Rock and Roll

After all, there is another way to look at this shift. Younger people, one could point out, are the only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time you swipe your debit card at Duane Reade or use your MetroCard, that transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.

So it may be time to consider the possibility that young people who behave as if privacy doesn’t exist are actually the sane people, not the insane ones.

The idea that this is essentially a *generation* gap is a bit overplayed. It is a magazine article, after all, and therefore sensationalized. So is the idea that it is a wide gulf rather than a set of gradual tendencies in change in attitudes toward "privacy". I'm pretty clearly at the generation-point the author posits as the sea change, and I know plenty of less private people older than me and plenty of more private people younger than me. I don't post *everything* about my life, not because I have any big secrets, but because I don't feel that an effort to get over my laziness about posting at all is worth the effort for the small number of people who read this journal. Perhaps that makes me an old fogey?

Motto seen on a bag with the logo of the NYU Medical Center's Hospital for Joint Diseases:

"When you're the best, you can only get better."

This is manifestly not true.