I love those anonymous comments to my musings....they remind me of the modern day essential dilemma of privacy and transparency.
We want everything that happens somewhere (in the government, in big public enterprises etc) or sometime (say facts of assasination of JFK) or someone famous (say Jennifer Aniston's new boyfriend) to be transparent yet when it comes to 'us' we value privacy more than anything.
Being an Indian and specifically a Bengali, my sense of privacy have always been vandalised by the in-borne 'para' culture............(for the uninitiated, para/chawl/potti are colloquial terms used in India for residential communities); people in the community kind of always knew what the other families were up to (which movies they watched last week, what type of fish they are cooking today etc). Thinking that now, its kind of hilariously scary that rarely there were any deep secrets between various families in a community.
Things changed over time, and people have become conscious of privacy so much that they are up against online search engines for storing apparently innocuous data. And people now don't bother to know anything about the neighbors, whether in condos in a high rise or sprawling single home communities. We all now have suddenly become hi-strung on the privacy topic as the government and federal agencies are collecting more information about each of us than we could possibly imagine. One way or other, our privacy rights are getting compromised everytime we do a transaction with any agencies on or off the web.
We can label this para feeling as tribal in one way where people were closely tied together for various reasons. The melting-pot culture of metro cities delineated the tribal principles over time. This change in trajectory in human cohesivenes definitely would be a good topic for anthropological research. More highways, more airlines, more social networking websites, more viral marketing appears to me as means to get back to that old primal tribal being. So why atleast NOT post anonymous comments to my blog entries?
I would love to know all of you. Peace.
2 comments:
as an anonymous interruption, may i draw your attention that we have had many authors writing under pseudonames, thus technically preserving their anonymity,however their signature veins eventually broke into their walls of privacy
a commendable piece of writing, keep it up and may such poised language find its way into your speech
quite a coincidence..wrote something along this line just yesterday.
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