This morning’s Today Show featured a segment about a New York actress who vents about her impending divorce on a YouTube video. She shot the video in her kitchen. Standing against her countertop, she dishes about the shortcomings of the couple’s sex life, offers up juicy details about the pre-nup, and angrily vents about what it’s like to get dumped. She even phones the office live.
Her public revelation of personal details is indicative of the 21st Century cultural phenomenon of exposing one’s painful personal difficulties on-line. While it raises interesting questions for the legal profession (she is in essence attempting to litigate via the Internet), it raises even more troublesome ones for society in general. According to psychiatrist Keith Ablow, who appeared on the segment, making the details of private matters public crosses a boundary that is important not just for healthy intimate relationships, but for a healthy self-concept. When the line between what is public and what is private gets blurred, the concept of self is compromised. When people turn their lives into television shows, they are not expressing themselves as individuals; they are stripping themselves of their individuality.
“This is desensitizing them from their own life stories,” Ablow said. “It suggests to others this isn’t real. This is a show.”
