Remember those "primitive" people who believe that your photograph of their face will rob them of themselves? They may have a point. Someone out there needs to do a study of people who are spread thin, thanks to too much exposure. Robert DeNiro comes to mind. I've forgotten which movie was the last one in which he was actually present. His latest appearances are reminiscent of those life-size cardboard images of Reagan. Cardboard DeNiro. That's what we've been getting.
I'm not trying to be frivolous here. I think there really is a chance that the spread of our selves far and wide may in fact seriously diminish our, well, personas. Reading a long-ago post at Jeff Sharlet's great blog, I found the the perils of surveillance came to mind. Any kind of surveillance, not just the NSA's. Sharlet writes about an old friend who is "lifelogging," recording every single minute of his life. The friend confesses:
One weekend I got tired of wearing the recorder and put it in a drawer. I felt liberated in a way that is hard to describe. That Sunday I found myself pacing the house and whispering to no one — something I often do when I'm alone and trying to work out ideas for stories I'm writing. I realized I rarely did this when I had the recorder on. It was like I was afraid someone would catch me acting schizophrenic.
But I'm probably the only person who will ever listen to the recordings, so what was I worried about?
Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University and an expert on privacy, explains my anxiety through a concept from Jewish law called hezzek re'iyyah, or "the injury caused by being seen." Jewish law says that the mere possibility of unwanted observation, even if no one is really watching, injures a person's sense of privacy.
Oh boy, "hezzek re'iyyah"! This is a wonderful discovery! The injury caused by being seen. It's hard not to think of those security cameras out in the business district, or the silly emails and phone calls that wind up in some database in Maryland. In his book about this, Rosen writes: "Even the smallest intrusion into private space by the unwanted gaze causes damage, because the injury caused by seeing cannot be measured."
We think of the intrusions demanded by the Bush administration as political crimes. And they are. But they and all other appearances we make may, like DeNiro's cardboard imitation of the once-excellent actor DeNiro, diminish us in ways that most of us haven't thought about in connection with "search and seizure." The intrusion doesn't have to be purposeful and nefarious for it to be harmful.
That's what hezzek re'iyyah reminds for this citizen who is tired of hearing about Y-switches and troubled (but impotent judges and members of Congress). Anyway, hezzek re'iyyah is sucking the life out of them, too.
