The End of Privacy

"Every so often, when I'm in Amsterdam, I visit the Rijksmuseum to remind myself about the history of privacy. I go there to gaze at a picture called The Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, which was painted by Jan Vermeer in 1663. It is of an unidentified Dutch woman avidly reading a letter. Vermeer's picture, to borrow a phrase from privacy advocates Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren, is a celebration of the "sacred precincts of private and domestic life". It's as if the artist had kept his distance in order to capture the young woman, cocooned in her private world, at her least socially visible." - Andrew Keen, "Your Life Torn Open"

STTA. Keen's article raises so many pressing issues about the value of personal privacy and threats to it, including Facebook. One thing we can focus on here is a remembrance of the sanctity, the specialness of a private moment. Yes, there really may be a way to share it in writing without spoiling it.