on public privates

Submitted by slewfoot on April 14, 2009 - 3:04pm

Music: And Also the Trees: (Listen For) The Rag and Bone Man (2007)

Communication scholar Bruce Gronbeck is visiting Aus-Vegas this week and wowing everyone with this wit and charm. This morning he guest lectured to my Introduction to Rhetorical Theory class on "what does a rhetorician know, and how?" He presented the students with, I think, one of the most lucid discussions of social construction I have yet to behold.

At lunch Bruce, some UT colleagues, and I got into a pretty involved discussion of contemporary publicity and the media (or this thing formerly termed the "mass media"). Although we're all well versed in the mantra that the public/private distinction is something of a fiction, nevertheless, we experience contemporary publicity differently than, say, a decade ago. YouTube is a good example: you can air very private details about your life to a potential audience of millions. If you type "cutting" into the YouTube search box, you will soon learn something very intimate about someone you don't know.

My colleague Keri Stephens then brought up the most recent popular video: A father filming his son's nitrous inspired speech after a trip to the dentist. Keri detailed how, as a mother, this video horrifies her.

So, not only does the New Publicity allow us to circulate our innermost, but this circulation makes us subject to surveillance, the moral policing of others. This means the pleasures of inviting the gaze are also tied up in transgression at some level (and doing intimate things to be punished is, of course, a sign of perversion). As a national public, we have been trained to enjoy the disclosure of secrets and become the moral arbiters of taste on a daily basis.

Is it safe to say that the private and public have imploded--at least conceptually? What is private anymore? (What is sacred?) Is there an ob-scene left? After all, Zizek tells us that the unconscious is "out there." What do you think?

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