Chris Phillibert Blog 9 Privacy and publicity

Within a community, there are a set of rules and guidelines that every member of the community must follow. Corresponding to these rules are customs that members of the community must adhere to in public. Public life is constructed on a community scale and is made up of rules that most members of the community agree on. Where private life and public life differ is that in private life, the rules and customs that are established are decided on by a much smaller group of people, sometimes even an individual. The rules sometimes resemble the rules that are established in public life, but they don't necessarily have to. A private life is the binary opposite to the public life and should be as guaranteed to members of the community as a public life is. The ability to switch between these modes of operating in the public life versus operating in the private life at our leisure is also a liberty that should be valued within a community. I believe that within a personal life, the nation plays the role of providing the template of how to construct your private life, but should also vigilantly fight to protect the citizen's right to construct their private life how they please so long as it doesn't hurt anyone else.

When we give presentations to the class, there is a perfect juxtaposition of the public and private life coming together to complete a task. The guidelines and rules for the project were given publicly in class and these guidelines had to be followed by the students as a template. However, so long as we met the necessary requirements for the project, we could construct the presentation in whatever manner we pleased. The ability to personally decide how to structure your presentation and privately thinking about the methods and goals you wanted to achieve while teaching your unit represents a liberty of privacy allotted to members of our social community. We agree on a general set of rules and guidelines to be followed, but the methods used and goals constructed for the project itself could come from the privacy of your own mind to be put on display in public. Michael Mann touches on the privacy of the citizen as a necessary rebellion against the government's natural desire to know all in "The Rise and Rise of the Nation State". He writes that the state needs to allow privacy and resist its desire for omnipotence or else the subaltern and oppressed will rise up to overthrow the state. I like to believe the class wouldn't have a rebellion if we weren't allowed a certain amount of customizable aspects to our project, but I do believe that allowing students to privately come up with ideas on their own is a way of fostering a good relationship between the authority and the governed in a community.

 I can't help but return to the idea that the mind is the ultimate realm of privacy. To my knowledge, we don't have the technology to read minds as clearly as we would hear speech spoken to us. Even though this technology can be mentally conceived, it should not be something to aspire to accomplish. Privacy is a completely necessary aspect of the psyche. If people and their thoughts were constantly being under watch by some sort of authority, there would be no balance between public life and private life at all. The mind in all of its intricacies should not be something to be judged or constantly surveyed by people whose minds themselves are no better than the ones they would preside over. Though this reality is only manifested in an oppressive Orwellian "1984" regime, this example highlights the importance of a balance between the public and private life and the ability to switch between the two at will through the use of our own private thoughts.