Description
American essayist and "Harper's "contributing editor Garret Keizer offers a brilliant, literate look at our strip-searched, over-shared, viral-videoed existence.""Body scans at the airport, candid pics on Facebook, a Twitter account for your stray thoughts, and a surveillance camera on every street corner - today we have an audience for all of the extraordinary and banal events of our lives. The threshold between privacy and disclosure becomes more permeable by the minute. But what happens to our private selves---indeed, the people who we truly are---when our public personas are left on? In this brilliant, penetrating addition to the Big Ideas/Small Books series, Garret Keizer considers the moral dimensions of privacy in relation to choice and equality. Choice not only protects us from violation but also allows social intercourse to be dignified, beautiful, and interesting. At the same time, privacy is most voluntary between persons of equivalent power. The struggle to achieve privacy---along with liberty and justice---for all is a fundamentally American one. If we endanger privacy, do we not also threaten the fundamental nature of human relationships, our will to freely guard and reveal ourselves?
