I am par­tic­i­pat­ing in a panel dis­cus­sion on “The Pub­lic and Pri­vate in Media” as a part of an art exhi­bi­tion: The New Nor­mal. The New Nor­mal exam­ines the issue of pri­vate infor­ma­tion becom­ing less pri­vate in our tech­no­log­i­cal soci­ety. Regard­less of how well I present/​discuss today, this exhi­bi­tion has made me reex­am­ine my ideas of the pri­vate as increas­ingly pub­lic beyond that of iden­tity theft and and the Patriot Act to include that of the cul­ture of pri­vacy sur­round­ing human­i­ties research. This is a topic that I have strug­gled with: express­ing my thoughts in an open forum via a blog and the “pub­lish­ing” of my research library via Zotero (see this post by Mark Sam­ple for a thought­ful reflec­tion on pub­lish­ing your Zotero library).

I choose to pub­lish a blog and my research — to make the pri­vate pub­lic – for two rea­sons. First, an online iden­tity is fast becom­ing a pre­req­ui­ste in the aca­d­e­mic world, and while it may be one that is not nec­es­sar­ily our choice or under our con­trol we can make it our choice and con­trol it by doing. Sec­ond, as Cameron Blevins and Mark Sam­ple have effec­tively argued, mak­ing one’s thoughts and research pub­lic offers schol­ars a new, impor­tant, and pow­er­ful way to col­lab­o­rate and con­tribute to human­ist schol­ar­ship at a greater level that ulti­mately makes one’s own work as well as that of other schol­ars bet­ter. The kicker, how­ever, is that while I con­trol — choose — the dis­sem­i­na­tion ini­tially, what hap­pens to the pri­vate made pub­lic may quickly leave my hands. The ques­tion is, then, is this nec­es­sar­ily a “bad” thing (maybe despite using a Cre­ative Com­mons license)? The essays by Michael Con­nor (cura­tor of The New Nor­mal), Marisa Olson, and Clay Shirky, I think, point out that the pri­vate made pub­lic is not nec­es­sar­ily bad or good only that the indi­vid­ual must become ever­more aware and proac­tive in man­ag­ing the private/​public (Skirky’s idea of the “opt-​in, opt-​out, don’t ask”?). This is not to sug­gest that there are not “bad” aspects; one need only have fol­lowed the con­tro­versy over Facebook’s Term of Ser­vice (also see this short Flash pre­sen­ta­tion), let alone the issues sur­round­ing the Patriot Act. Nonethe­less, I think the issue of the pri­vate made pub­lic as con­tained and exam­ined in The New Nor­mal is exam­ined as a com­pli­cated issue that is as much grey as it is black and white, and that, ulti­mately, the issue becomes one of choice, of con­trol and when we have con­trol over the pri­vate made pub­lic and when we do not.

I must admit that I feel that I will be out of my league dur­ing the panel dis­cus­sion, that I have not had enough time to inter­nal­ize the mate­r­ial and the idea of the way in which the pri­vate is becom­ing increas­ingly more pub­lic. I do, how­ever, know that my par­tic­i­pa­tion, the air­ing of my pri­vate thoughts in a pub­lic space even if incom­plete about the pri­vate and the pub­lic is good: good for fur­ther­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion; what I can learn from the other pan­elists and the audi­ence; for fur­ther­ing my own work in the dig­i­tal human­i­ties; and under­stand­ing the issue of the pri­vate and the pub­lic as it relates to one of my dig­i­tal projects, the Oral His­tory Cat­a­logue.