Book Documents the Rise and Fall of the Concept of the Private Life

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

A review of the book Strangers and Intimates, which asks Are we killing off the idea of private life?

Whatever happened to good old-fashioned privacy? Nowadays, practically everything about us is known, traded and exploited by social media platforms, even when we aren't opening the curtains on our inner lives ourselves. Click. There's the sourdough your smug uncle made this morning. Click. There's your friend crying about a missed promotion. Click. There's a stranger inviting you - for a fee, of course - into their bedroom.

You would expect a book called Strangers and Intimates: The rise and fall of private life to have views on all of this - and it does, except that they are less straightforward, more considered and much richer than most others in this area.

As its author, the cultural historian Tiffany Jenkins, puts it: Many blame this situation on narcissistic individuals who broadcast their lives online or on tech companies that devour personal data, but this overlooks the deeper changes at play." And hers is a text about those deeper changes.

In Jenkins's account, these mostly took place in the 20th century - and they were multifarious. Chapters are devoted to everything from the prying capabilities of smaller cameras - Kodak fiends" were a particular turn-of-the-century nuisance - to the broader implications of Bill Clinton's trysts with Monica Lewinsky - the private suddenly became fiercely political.

[...] Scientific thinkers aren't exempted from this narrative. The behaviourist trinity of Paul Lazarsfeld, Edward Bernays and Ernest Dichter receive special attention for their collective work, in the first half of the 20th century, to turn humans into data and data into marketable insights. None of them acted maliciously, but they helped erode the sense that certain parts of life should be off-limits, rather than grist for corporate interests. Much the same could be said of biologist Alfred Kinsey's famous surveys of people's sex lives. Is nothing sacred?

We have allowed our two worlds to become compromised and blurred. The private is increasingly public

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