I was raised in house on a “half-mile stretch of narrow road in the shadow of the Shawangunk Ridge,” where “our past, our present and our future collide and struggle to somehow co-exist.” Today, no matter the cul-de-sacs, no matter the acres of (zoned) sub-divisions, landing hi-speed Internet requires persistence. You need to harangue cable companies : get them to explain; inevitably, though, we’re told that the necessary equipment - the cables or whatever - stop running a half-mile from the home, in either directions. It’s up-hill both ways, or something like that.

In the late ’90s, no one missed hi-speed Internet because most of us hadn’t yet been exposed to it. In the late ’90s, from the fringes of most meaningful, high school cliques, I took to the Web, putting up crappy pages & engaging in non-sense debates in my local newspaper’s forum.

Yes, before I had landed my first kiss, I’d landed my first url. Both, I’m not afraid to admit, were sloppy as hell. Those old geocities site addresses invoked ancient architecture; my first web page was housed in Geocitie’s “Colosseum.”

In the late ’90s, my peers were emailing & instant messaging, but they were certainly not forging robust online identities. But then the Web changed. Many of us moved into dorms at colleges, learned what an Ethernet cord was, learned we didn’t have to dial-up, & learned that none of us had to contribute to what must have been an outlandish-electricity bill. We kept our computers on 24/7.

More importantly, whenever our computers were on, AIM was on. Profiles became personal ad-space for the witty & profound. Away messages proved one of two things : you had somewhere to be or you were groping for a slogan that made it sound like you had somewhere to be.

From the fringes from all meaningful social cliques, I groped for slogans that made it sound like I had somewhere better to be. (But then the Web changed.) My one-or-two line away messages - quotable quotes, of sorts - earned me a fan-club of AIM nobodies. Not of automated, virus-ridden messages … those came later, but of AIM buddies I neither knew nor knew were looking. One day, one of them messaged me, complimenting my away messages & letting me know that s/he had friends who also kept me on their buddy list just to read my aways.

So there was an audience; sometimes anonymous, sometimes not. (Before the RIAA infiltrated file-sharing networks & freaked university ITS’s out, students who shared the densest & most eccentric mixes of music were minor-celebrities; if you ran into one, you’d be genuinely excited & refer to them by their network computer name.) &, by offering their attention, these audiences could elevate an online contribution to something greater than the mundaneness from which it emerged. (Or, at least, that’s where my away messages came from.)

In other words, when the Web changed, it was time for popular kids to ransack the fringe’s bandwidth.

I woke up this morning, to read again about the day the Web changed. This time, the narrative came at from me a New York Magazine feature “Say Anything.” (Tiara.org directed her readers, including this one, to that link.)

“Say Anything” is an eight (web)page sojourn through the generational gap between the prophets & junkies of Web 2.0 & their parents. In what might be the most profound passage of the feature, the latter - the parents, hand-wringers, ITS administrators, & surveillance studies professors - are the insane ones.

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. For someone like me, who grew up sealing my diary with a literal lock, this may be tough to accept. But under current circumstances, a defiant belief in holding things close to your chest might not be high-minded. It might be an artifact—quaint and naïve, like a determined faith that virginity keeps ladies pure. Or at least that might be true for someone who has grown up “putting themselves out there” and found that the benefits of being transparent make the risks worth it.

This is an eloquent & compelling defense of our Web habits. Surveillance is nothing new. Orwell, we know, sensed 1984 in 1949. & it was in 1965 that Bob Dylan warned that the “phone’s tapped anyway.”

(Then again, it’s been 42 years since he warned us that the vandals took all the handles & that hasn’t come to pass…)

Of course, this defense (or excuse?) for Web habits, as well as cultural attitudes about them, ignores, as both tiara.org & Kenneth Rufo point out, the context in which : who? teenagers : FaceBook, MySpace, & YouTube : politicians : market researchers : off privacy.

This is not to say that to put an address or name or image online is only naive or is really that much more exposing than the pieces of us we leave (or have taken from us) during our day-to-day.

It is to say that this article, as entertaining as it might & as littered with hip-looking teenagers & 20-somethings as it might be &, especially in its discussion of the changing face(s) of fame, as profound as it might be, ignores the efforts of a whole lot of political, social, technological, & corporate forces to develop the webscape of privacy.

This is the new sound, just like the old sound(?)

A final thought. If you read the New York Magazine article pay attention to how “old” ways of doing gender creep into this story. See, especially : the (now) familiar story about the sex tape : in this article, at least, always released by a man : who, apparently, has nothing to lose in exposing how he performs sex : to the detriment - or gain, as the case may be - of a woman. It’s not new, nor surprising, but it’s there. Just another “symbolic edifice … as structuring principle” (to again quote Kenneth Rufo) that points us to the intensity & expense at which the privacy of some, & not others, erodes.

EP