Futuríveis

Feinman is a primo example of an emerging archetype: the very public citizen. A publizen.

Though publizens are all ages and both sexes, they are predominantly young -- members of Generation Xtrovert. The recently released Pew Internet & American Life Project survey points out that more than half of the Internet's 12 million bloggers are under the age of 30.

In varying degrees, publizens grow up, fall in love, choose a college, drink too much, do good deeds, experiment with drugs and sex and kinky hairstyles, sit for tattoos, create art, enter 12-step programs, get hitched, give birth, go to work, file for divorce, die and do just about everything else in public. They build Web sites, produce blogs and star in reality television shows. They use new technologies to live in plain sight and newer technologies -- fancier phones, Web cams, digital video programs -- are being created so they can do just that.

Publizens welcome the klieg lights -- the glare, the heat, the exposure. British papers reported recently that Marie Osmond's teenage daughter Jessica put up a MySpace page revealing her sexual proclivities and listing Adolf Hitler as a hero. Young people have been kicked out of college for exhibiting pictures of themselves carousing.

People have given up on discretion. How else can you explain the unabashed Metro rider yakking about the most intimate details of her life on her cell phone? The endless erectile dysfunction advertisements on television? Why else would there be very personal videotapes online for all the world to see?

Tens of thousands of applicants have applied to live on camera in reality shows.

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You wonder why there was no marching in the streets when it was revealed that the National Security Agency has been monitoring telephone calls. People are worn down by companies tracking their every move, they are convinced that giving out privileged information might help combat terrorism and, as more and more people become publizens, they just don't care if other people eavesdrop. Fact is, they know others are listening.

"It is less and less reasonable for people to expect privacy," says Tim Sparapani, legislative counsel for privacy rights at the American Civil Liberties Union, "when people are willy-nilly putting private information into a public sphere where millions if not billions of people have access to it." He believes that there are still zones of privacy many people hold dear, but that those zones may be shrinking. And he warns that both the government and private corporations have a deep interest in gathering that private information and using it for their own interests.

Sherry Turkle of the MIT Media Lab shares some of Sparapani's concerns. The new generation of publizens, she says, understands that e-mail isn't really private and that cell conversation can be overheard, but "is not politically mobilizable around the issue of government intrusions on privacy."

Recently, Turkle attended the Webbys, an awards ceremony for Web sites. "I found a troubling sensibility that I see as widespread in the culture today: 'Wiretap me, I don't care. Listen to me, my life is transparent, I'm not doing anything wrong.' "

There seems to be little understanding, she says, of "the importance of the principle of privacy as a protection against authoritarianism." Publizens often operate with no historical sense, she says.

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Kevin Kelly, a founding editor of Wired magazine, says that privacy is an illusion. "We've always been very public as a species." he says. "The very notion of privacy is recent, and probably temporary. Big Brother is a type of paranoia and egoism, because in fact most lives are not worth watching. With technology we are only returning to the global village where everyone knows what everyone else is doing."

Cultural anthropologist Danah Boyd says living a public life can be a healthy undertaking. In this culture of fear, "it is critical for young people to have some exposure to public life, to strangers," she says. "You need this to grow up."

Publizens like Dave Feinman, Ingrid Wiese and Joseph Argabrite thrive on the responses to their public lives. The exterior life for many is as important as, if not more important than, the interior life.

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