We have traded the privacy of the cloister for the privacy of the haystack.

In a sense, that has been happening since the dawn of urbanization. The rural form of privacy was very simple : the nearest neighbor was miles away and there was nobody (apart from kin) around to have the slightest idea what you were doing.

This was the privacy of the cloister. And it operated in a certain way. Because, most of the time, there was absolutely nobody unfamiliar around, the arrival of a stranger was a welcome diversion from ordinary life. Rural life, even in the worst of times, usually provides at least a slight surplus of resources, and so the stranger’s arrival gives everyone the excuse to break open the reserves, use up everything that won’t last anyhow, and have a good time.

In that sense, the greater physical privacy leads to openness and hospitality. But in another sense, because each family is essentially a homogeneous community, a kingdom of its own, it also leads to great inflexibility and tolerance. Exposure to diversity is very low, and the concept of what is acceptable and normal is therefore very narrow.

When people start living closer together, something changes. Now, prying eyes are everywhere. People know what you get up to. If you have a fight with your wife, the neighbors hear it. If you are too poor to dress your kids properly, everyone can see it. If you get up to some funny business with someone from work who is definitely not your spouse, everyone hears about it.

So already, simply by living in a village or town, there has been a loss of privacy. In small communities, everyone knows everybody and so, without anyone planning on it exactly, everyone is always keeping tabs on everyone else.

This is when the concept of “minding your own business” comes into play. For people to provide privacy to one another by social custom, there has to be defined areas into which you do not seek information and if you are exposed to information accidentally, you either ignore it or file it away deep in the back of your mind.

This is a mutually supported system. You don’t pry into my business and I won’t pry into yours. Everybody has a roughly equal stake in making sure the system works. And so the system works.

You can see this trend in modern life in how many of our boundaries are, in a sense, imaginary. This is my yard, not your yard, because I have fences or driveways or whatever that give you a visual sense of where my private space begins and ends, and I can rest assured that this will be enough because we have all agreed to respect these boundaries. They do not have to physically bar people from entry. All but the most mentally compromised individuals respect these mostly social boundaries.

And in our homes, we have our own rooms, where a completely unlocked (and usually unlockable) door is all we need in order to signal that this is our personal space and therefore it would be a violation of our privacy to enter uninvited.

Another thing happened as our towns and villages grew, however. It stopped being possible for everybody to know everybody. Past a certain number of people in a community, our brains run out of space for new people and so we have to deal in our lives with the presence of strangers.

Now, instead of a welcome diversion, the presence of a stranger is a potential threat. Our small-community instincts, being both communal and insular, tell us that unknown humans are a potential threat. Our territories are much smaller, but the smaller they get, the more fiercely they are defended.

But with strangers also comes the possibility of anonymity. If nobody knows you, then you are, in essence, freed from some of the constraints of your own community of peers, and this affords greater individual freedom of expression. You have privacy not because you are far away from everyone else but because to them, you are just another face in a crowd.

Or put another way, just another needle in a haystack full of needles. You are right there for anyone to see, and yet, you are also just one pebble in an avalanche.

Now we come to this modern age, where we live closer together than ever before and our territories are smaller and tighter than ever before. This has reduced physical privacy more than ever, but at the same time, social privacy has never been greater because we have no idea who our neighbors are. Physical proximity now has absolutely no relationship to community membership. The concept that your neighbors are your community seems absurd now. I’m going to be in a community of people simply because random chance has thrown us into physical proximity? How can that make any sense?

Then add in the Internet. With it, we can form communities with like-minded people from all around the world. They are not quite sufficient to replace all the things we once got from a more physical form of community, but on the other hand, we can form communities of people with more things in common than ever before.

This is why the watchword for the last decade or more has been “social media”. Virtual community is filling the gap left by the retreat of physical community. We are more interconnected than ever before and the rate of connection continues to expand as the crowdsourcing phenomena takes over from the more usual top-down economies of scale.

In this era, people gladly give away information they would protect if anyone tried to take it from them. Sharing is the new form of community, and as we share our lives with another, we become a greater form of humanity, and the insular forces of like-minded communities pale before the far greater forces of global consciousness.

After all, even from our new cloisters of opinion, we end up getting exposed to the same trends and news stories and events via the common stream of sharing and commenting.

And that is one of the many reasons I love the Internet.

I never do end up going where I meant to go with these things, do I?

Talk to your tomorrow, folks!