Death by exposure?

As you've probably heard already, Time magazine's pick for its 2006 "Person of the Year" was "You" (as in "all of us"). Inspired by the rise of YouTube, Wikipedia and MySpace, Time celebrated the Internet's empowerment of the average person: the fact that we -- acting as our own movie studio, our own record label, our own newspaper, our own publicist -- have provided the content that has made the Web the most powerful tool of our time.\nPretty exciting, but you don't get to be Time's "Person of the Year" without paying a cost. And what has me curious is not merely the nature of this cost, but our seemingly unabashed willingness to pay it.\nA couple of recent celebrity scandals seem to be illustrative of this larger trend:\nCalifornia Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger found himself in hot water after private audio recordings featuring frank criticisms of other state political figures -- Republican and Democratic -- fell into the hands of the Los Angeles Times. Incredibly, these recordings had been posted on a public section of Schwarzenegger's own official Web site, where they were downloaded by opponents and given to the press.\nMeanwhile, Paris Hilton found herself in a brouhaha more potentially damaging than her sex tapes or "commando" paparazzi shots after a YouTube video featured her apparently using racist and homophobic slurs at a party. The video came from the Web site ParisExposed.com, whose operators claimed to have bought the tape when it and other belongings that Hilton kept in a Los Angeles storage facility were auctioned off after the multi-millionaire failed to pay her storage fee. Hilton is currently suing to shut down the site.\nThese high-profile examples highlight the downside of our informal tendency toward "lifelogging" that has emerged with the wonders of the digital age. In a fascinating article from this week's Chronicle of Higher Education, Scott Carlson examines the growing research into and implications of lifelogging -- "documenting all (one's) conversations, movements, ideas, and correspondence through audio recorders, digital cameras, GPS trackers, pedometers, brain scanners, and other gadgets".\nThe benefits are obvious. Imagine never forgetting an important moment, being able to leave behind a perfect memoir, gaining such insight into human behavior and history. At the same time, imagine having a record of every painful moment, every slight, every sin, every confidence -- and imagine having it become available, deliberately or accidentally, to the whole wide world.\nHardly anyone engages in lifelogging to the extent of the researchers interviewed by Carlson, but most people reading this column (and yours truly) have taken advantage of digital technology to not only record far more information about ourselves, but to make it available to strangers without giving it a second thought.\nSo, why is it that posting information on Facebook doesn't bother us, but talking to a stranger on the bus feels weird? I have no answer. But, then again, having publicized my beliefs in about 140 opinion columns, I'm probably not the best person to ask, either.