Back in May I wrote a post about writing online entitled When Did You Become an Exhibitionist? (It's interesting how much of my traffic results from the word exhibitionist in the title of a single post.) It was essentially about the trade-off between anonymity and visibility:
It does feel naked to write online, and you will worry about being uncomfortably exposed. I did--and do.
But whether you're an individual worried about looking foolish, or an organizational leader worried about staff members airing dirty laundry in public, you're still facing the same challenge--you have to weigh the risks of exposure against the risks of invisibility.
I've been thinking recently about this trade-off because of Esther Dyson's Release 1.0 piece on anonymity and the responses it engendered, so I wasn't surprised when it came to mind while reading Grant McCracken's latest. His post as a whole touches on a broad range of topics, as usual, but there was one specific passage that grabbed me:
[T]his was the trip in which I discovered that I dance in elevators (and absolutely no place else). The elevators in the Imperial hotel in Tokyo have little video cameras in the corner. This was enough to prompt me to think about what I was doing, and to discover, to my astonishment, that I was dancing. I am not a good dancer. By which I mean I'm a Canadian, but there is something about being in those suspended little cubicles that brings out the disco artist within.
His protests to the contrary, Grant apparently enjoys having an audience. He dances in elevators not despite the security cameras but because of them. This is not an insignificant distinction, and it's correlated with other success factors in today's, ah, exhibitionistic online environment. (I couldn't help myself. Let's see who that drags in.)
We now put a very high value on the ability to think, to write, to perform in plain view and in real time. Don't run off to your garret. Do it here, now.
I suspect that sort of pressure makes most of us break out in a cold sweat. Or maybe it's just me. But I--and perhaps you, too--need to get over it. We've grown up with this idea of the Writer working in pristine isolation, handing down stone tablets at some unknown point in the future. And I hope at least a few Geniuses stay true to themselves, follow that model, and Bring Forth some New Ideas. But now that we're ALL writers, in one way or another, and we're ALL participating in this world-wide colloquy, we need to let go, lighten up, feel more comfortable in the spotlight (however dim), and start dancing in elevators (security cameras be damned.)
Exhibitionism or simply a human need for contact/dialogue/attention? For blogs, which is a little different than dancing in elevators, I think the appeal is that someone will notice our ideas. Exhibitionism denotes, to me anyway, an almost pathological need for visual attention in particular.
Posted by: Mark | Dec 10, 2005 at 06:17 AM