Maura, I like what you say about privacy, especially regarding memoirs. I have wondered if there should be more consent forms or laws required, and it’s not just family secrets. My sister had planned to write a sort of history of our family/memoir about my dad, mostly. There wasn’t really a huge horrible secret to be exposed, it was more along the lines of there are just things about my past I don’t openly share with people, especially strangers. If the book had been published then any stranger with google access could read my entire life history and make judgments about me without my knowledge or consent. And she wasn’t saying anything libelous so there was really no way I could prevent it from being published. Thankfully she never found a publisher and (I hope) has discarded her plan.

Internet facilitates prying into people’s private lives. Based on a few fundamental tenets such as freedom of expression, we generally agree on how much prying — and telling — should be legally permitted. But independent of the legality of an act are the personal ethics of it. Most people prefer their personal lives to remain private — even if modern technology makes some of it available for others to pry into and expose. Collating such data into an anonymous database is fine, but exposing an individual without his/her permission — even if it’s legal — shouldn’t be done. That’s the ethics of it; that’s being gracious to others.

G

The uncanny intersections in your story feel like hyperlinks; it is a small world online too. I appreciate that you chose not to interact with JH when he first stepped into your breathing world. And I love that you did end up sharing your story with him–whether he deserved to be “unpleasantly surprised” or not doesn’t seem to be the question to me. I think you are creating boundaries with your own art that feel respectful to you, and trustworthy to me. Thanks for this–I look forward to more, more, more of your work.

Armchair anthropology is something that is practiced from afar, and which results in the complete objectification of the subject based on gross generalizations. To spell it out, armchair is a metaphor, used to signify the fact that armchair ‘anthropologists’ avoid engaging directly with their subjects and instead assess ‘other’ cultures through hearsay. Armchair anthropology is “facile” by nature, and (as it dates back to the 17th century) is no longer practiced. I would say that the work of Jonathan Harris is very much a modern revival of armchair anthropology–he is collecting information without engaging directly with his subjects (replace armchair with laptop), later applying his data to a preconceived framework that is built of his personal ideas regarding online dating culture.

Reading your description of how you started to imagine Jonathan as an ideal partner was really intense for me. It’s so easy to encounter someone online, and from just the tiniest threads of a personality to start filling out the rest. Plus, we’ve all become pretty expert at portraying ourselves online, creating our own little personal brands, even if we don’t mean to. Even the negatives (I’m such a nerd!) start to feel like the old interview line “I would say my biggest weakness is that sometimes I work too hard.” I mean, we do all these things in real life too, but I think the internet has made it so easy for completely unintentional deception and self-delusion.

I think I really like the article because it seems to be both about this idea and also defying it, because you’re sharing things from your life that are embarrassing in a way that people try to avoid. I mean, like, actually embarrassing maybe? Anyway, lots to think about and lots to relate to and I really love it. Thanks for sharing.