A true Northwesterner and a cat, our Wiki always seeks the sun. As I stepped over her perfectly relaxed form asleep on the kitchen floor this morning, I remembered how she got her name: Wikileaks. She appeared in our driveway crying and starving at the time Julian Assange and Wikileaks was in the news for the second time. Mike and I talked about the need for transparency in government versus the dread of having every single thing you ever said exposed for public scrutiny. Mike said he just didn't know, but Wikileaks was a great name for a cat, and so Wiki was christened and kept.
I still have mixed feelings about Wikileaks and Edward Snowden and whatever secrets will next be trumpeted over the internet. I am firmly in favor of sunshine laws and the public's need to know and suspicious of shenanigans and cover-ups, but it seems like combing through garbage has become the new way to gather news. Since everything we write or say seems to be preserved electronically nobody is safe from the potential exposure of embarrassing private stuff. Monica Lewinsky recently gave an interesting Ted Talk about her experiences in the public eye. Besides the torrent of vilification aimed at her personally over the internet, her roommate secretly recorded twenty hours of her phone conversations in which she was, by her own admission, banal, unkind and uncouth, and then released them to the Starr Commission where they reside, permanently available to anyone who wants to hear them. I haven't been sleeping with the President, but I still wouldn't like strangers sifting through and evaluating my words uttered in what I thought was private.
I think it is the glee with which this stuff is revealed more than the fact of it that bothers me most. Its like our new version of public hanging. Paid scavengers comb through the backgrounds of anyone at all famous for crumbs of dirt and expose whatever they think will be embarrassing either for money (paparazzi) or at the behest of enemies (usually political) who gain advantage by blackening the names of their opponents. The media apparently profits from either, judging by the way it fans the flames, but someone must be reading, listening and clicking or the profits wouldn't be there. What are we unwashed rabble getting from the unending scandal machine, and how do we know we won't be next?
Another variation came up the other day on the blog Design Sponge, in which people share pictures of their homes. Grace Bonney, the author and curator of the blog, wrote a very thoughtful post asking people to temper their scathing personal comments on homes and people they don't like. Not the ones saying they find this room or that credenza unpleasing, but the ones who make assumptions about the homeowners level of income, or quality of housekeeping, or amount of discretionary time and go after them like sharks. People have been bemoaning the lack of civility on the internet almost from the first, and it appears that we are making no progress. I was researching washing machines a while ago and the thread I was reading descended into a name-calling brawl about religion, starting with the prig who said she thought the high end washing machines being discussed were a sign of modern decadence. Sigh. We are so quick to take offense against perceived slights and so nasty hiding behind the anonymity of the internet. The ones most revealed by the hateful comments are the commenters, but no one knows their names.
Exposure and anonymity. Light and dark.