Technology is currently crying out for your attention. Twitter wants to know, “What are you doing?” Facebook is asking, “What are you doing right now?” There’s a good chance that your personal, work, and spam email accounts all have new messages waiting for you, friends or acquaintances may be inviting you to LinkedIn or Friendfeed, or maybe your cell phone is ringing. “Not long ago, it was easy to feel lonely,” William Deresiewicz writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education, “now it’s impossible to be alone.”

The technology demands constant attention, because that’s what people want. The “contemporary self,” according to Deresiewicz, “wants to be recognized, wants to be connected: It wants to be visible.” The websites offer visibility at no monetary cost, but users end up sacrificing their solitude, privacy, and, in some ways, the ability to be alone.

The technology has a spiritual cost, too. “Religious solitude is a kind of self-correcting social mechanism,” Deresiewicz writes, “a way of burning out the underbrush of moral habit and spiritual custom.” This kind of self-reflection is nearly impossible if people don’t quit tweeting, texting, and calling every once in a while.

The costs of constant contact become more extreme as technology improves. New applications for the iPhone and Google’s new G1 (which I bought 3 weeks ago), allow people to connect with Twitter, Facebook, and a host of location-aware applications at all times. Programs like WhosHere, Whrrl, and the dubiously named LifeAware give near-constant GPS-based updates to friends or strangers of where people are and how to connect.

Some of these location-aware applications go too far, even for tech enthusiasts. Mathew Honan, the man behind BarackObamaIsYourNewBicycle, explored the labyrinthine world of the GPS-based applications for Wired and found paradoxically, “I had gained better location awareness but was losing my sense of place.”

The flood of tweets, updates, and friend request can quickly become indistinguishable from real life (aka RL). The din can easily stand in the way of deeper thoughts and self-reflection. “In effect,” according to the Winter 2007 issue of n+1, “this mode of constant self-report can be summed up in a single phrase: “I am on the phone. I am on the phone. I am on the phone.’”

Image by Juhan Sonin, licensed under Creative Commons.

The Bush Administration is known for its extreme secrecy. Reports of warantless wiretapping and secret CIA prisons have made big news, but overall, it’s hard to know how deep the government cover-ups go. In 2006, the political website Talking Points Memo started the “insanely ambitious” project to record “every significant instance of this administration stifling government information.” An excerpt of the list was published in the March-April issue of Utne Reader.

In a noisy sidewalk café in New York City, I had a chance to sit down with Paul Kiel, deputy editor of Talking Points Memo to talk about the list, the Bush Administration’s trend of secrecy, and what people are doing about it.

 UtneCast Interview with Talking Points Memo's Paul Kiel: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The Dog Poop Girl got famous when her dog pooped on the subway and she neglected to clean it up. The Star Wars Kid made it big after he filmed himself reenacting a light saber fight from the movie Star Wars. These normally mundane activities would have been quickly forgotten, were it not for the promotional power of the internet. After a cell phone photo of the Dog Poop Girl and a video of the Star Wars Kid were found on the web, these two people’s places in pop culture lore were enshrined forever.

Using examples like these, Daniel Solove, an associate professor at the George Washington University Law School, explores the balance between the right to privacy and the freedom of speech in his new book The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet. After reviewing his book for the January-February issue of Utne Reader had a few questions I wanted to ask him. To read the entire book for free, click here, and listen to the podcast by clicking on the "Listen Here" link below.

—Bennett Gordon

 The Future of Privacy: Listen Here

Intimate details of peoples’ lives are freely available through the magic of Google. Many people post their names, email and street addresses, phone numbers, and photos to the internet, without much thought about it. According to a survey released last month by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 60 percent of internet users aren’t worried about how much of their personal information is available online.

Teenagers and children are often accused of being too cavalier with the details of their lives, but the survey suggests that adults are even more open with their personal information. Among people with visible profiles on social networking sites, such as MySpace or Facebook, the study reports that teens “make more conservative choices with respect to visibility” than their adult counterparts. A full 61 percent of adults don’t try to limit how much information is available about them online, and only 38 percent said that they have taken action to limit that information.  

“Of course, what amuses me is that adults are saying one thing and doing another,” writes social networking guru Danah Boyd on her blog. Adults are telling children to protect themselves online, and then not protecting their own information. That kind of “do as I say, not as I do” attitude could hinder a meaningful and nuanced view of privacy in both children and adults.

—Bennett Gordon