Publicizing the Privacy

As our hindi teacher in high school often reiterated, Man is a social animal (In her terms: मनुष्य एक सामाजिक प्राणी है। (Ooh.. I love this multilingual feature of Google's)). I think that's the best way to describe the issue in hand. We, humans, by nature live in society. We need certain amount of socializing in order to survive and still we need some amount of privacy from people around us. A contrasting requirement. We have invented so many ways to increase our communications. From the earliest method of communication developed by humans, i.e., development of a language, followed by writing skills to some kind of postal system, we did quiet a lot to communicate and socialize. And now we have telephones, cell-phones, pagers and above all, internet. We email, blog, become members of social internet networks and still we want to live in our own private world. The question is where does socializing ends and where does the privacy begins? For example, are friends part of socializing and end of privacy or are they part of our private world?

Sharing thoughts is communication, sharing with whom makes it private or public. But now-a-days the means of communications decides the audience and hence deciding about it being private or public. Still that doesn't deter us from putting our most private thoughts on a public platform. At times, under an assumed name. The question being: Are the personal thoughts communicated on a public platform under an assumed name private or public?

Take me, for instance (no I am not using any assumed names), I like to blog (as should be evident by the frequency of posts on this blog) but only very few of my friends know about this blog. None of my campus friends have this url (which is ironic as the blog is titled Grad Life). I don't want any one and everyone, who knows me personally, to know about my personal thoughts but somehow strangers reading these posts doesn't bother me. Does that make me a hypocrite? I want to connect with a world beyond the one I am living in but I don't want to open up in the world I am already living in. And somehow this is an issue of privacy for me. Strange, isn't it? I guess this brings us back to the initial question: where does the privacy begin? What is privacy? May be, being a social animal we can't live in a private world, we will communicate and reach out to someone, not necessarily our friends, somehow, not necessarily by a private communication. Thats our instinct.

Your thoughts?