The Decline and Fall of the Private Self

Once upon a time, people kept secrets. Today's tell-all bloggers and MySpace denizens have made the notion of a guarded personal life feel obsolete. What effect does such exposure have on the psyche?

By Carlin Flora, published on May 01, 2007 - last reviewed on July 17, 2007

In exchange for his brutal honesty, he's suffered a barrage of online criticism and mockery. Though he considers most of his life's work to be infused with autobiographical elements, he did pause before writing the blog and a memoir: "I thought, do I want everyone to know the deep recesses of my sexuality, my parents, all that stuff? The fear was that then people would judge me, that perhaps they wouldn't like me. But I didn't want to act out of fear, so I asked myself, is there a positive reason to do this? And that would be connecting to people who appreciate me expressing myself and revealing my weaknesses."

Perhaps we simply have less to be ashamed of in an increasingly free-to-be-you-and-me era. "More and more people believe they are entitled to behave according to their own values and not the norms prevailing in society," Ben-Ze'ev says. That means there is less of a need to keep a protected private self, free from the scrutiny of strangers. Each of us has our own (sometimes curious) sense of what's appropriate: Cutler is more embarrassed about a blog entry in which she gushed about some now-outdated earrings than the ones about taking money from paramours. "I didn't tell them to pay me—that's their shame," she says. "I'm single. I can date as many people as I want. Apologizing for that would be stupid."

Nor do self-disclosers feel sheepish about craving the spotlight. "I've always thought of myself as being in a movie, that my world is larger than life," says Schaeffer. "There's a way in which our lives seem valid only if they obtain some veneer of media recognition," says Jefferson Singer, a psychologist at Connecticut College. A blog makes your mundane life into an electronic saga that turns you into something more than an anonymous drone in a technological and impersonal world. "You now have a story and perhaps you've even become the focus of other watchers and listeners," says Singer. "You become a character, a speaking part, in the larger theater of society." Even if you're playing the role of the loser—blogging about being unhappy and unattractive—at least you're part of the show.

Schaeffer is contemplative about the vitriol his blog has garnered. "I wonder why I am not an antihero. Maybe it's because other people purely play the schlub, whereas I claim my successes as well as my weaknesses. I embrace both."

What does all this gut spilling do for the spillers? Is it healthy to expose your struggles, fears, and adventures to an audience? In the second of his bestselling memoirs, Dry, Augusten Burroughs explains why public disclosure, at least in front of a small, like-minded audience, is so appealing to the confessor: "It's like some sort of love affair, stripped of the courtship phase. I feel bathed in safety."

He's right: Telling secrets has been shown to have a positive effect on the person who's doing the confessing, because keeping them requires a lot of mental work. Wegner has found that actively trying to suppress a thought (like trying not to think about a white bear) actually seems to repeatedly refresh your mental browser and bring it to mind. "It's almost as though there's a little corner of the mind that's looking for the very thing you're trying not to think about," he says. Sharing the secret, though, "unprimes" the information, freeing the mind to focus on other things and breaking the cycle of worry. By recounting their sins and lapses, the AA member and the blogger can unload pesky thoughts and mull more productive ones for the rest of the day.

Recording concerns in a journal or similar medium can be particularly effective. "When people write about secrets, they report feeling better; they acknowledge the events and can organize them," says Jamie Pennebaker, professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. In one study, he asked subjects to write for 15 minutes a day for several days. They showed positive changes in immune function and psychological well-being. Other research shows that when couples are asked to keep reflective diaries in which they write about their relationship, they stay together longer.

Pennebaker isn't convinced that these benefits apply to public disclosers, because bloggers, who write for an audience, probably won't engage in the same level of emotional processing as they would if writing just for themselves. Though their audience may be small and their true identity concealed, bloggers type with an eye toward self-presentation. They may resist the urge to lie, but they'll be tempted to blunt the edges of ugly revelations with humorous comments.

"Blogging has elements of theater," he says. "If you're writing and you know lots of people are going to be looking at it, you're going to change things to make yourself look good." Whether he realizes it or not, the online scribe cultivates an identity that anticipates and responds to its audience. "Blogging as therapy is not a good idea," says Cutler. "When you're blogging, you're not thinking, 'What's my motivation?' You're thinking, 'This is what I did today.'"

But Irina Kendall, who writes the blog Spectacularly Normal, is convinced of the benefits. "Blogging has been immensely therapeutic for me," she says. When she started posting about her life a year ago, Kendall, 31, a mother of a five-year-old daughter, was unhappy. Her fiance had no idea she was anorexic and bulimic. "There was so much going on in my head and I felt really alone," she says. After reading and feeling a kinship with other personal bloggers such as Heather Armstrong of dooce.com, Kendall set up her own page. Sharing her daily external and internal happenings has helped her sort out her feelings.