This past evening on the Future of Education site, a very good webinar was provided with the author/speaker Thomas Frey (featured in previous posts).  Beyond the obvious excitement that the Web 2.0 offers for education, one concern has been bugging me.  What about the breakdown between the separation between the public and the private life?  While this may not be an obvious issue for many immersed in social media, hosts of philosophers have concerned themselves with this issue for quite sometime (e.g. Aristotle, Adam Smith, Marx, Hannah Arendt, and many more).  What is the main concern is voiced best by Arendt in the human condition when she stated,

“Since the rise of society… an irresistible tendency [has] grown, to devour the older realms of the political and private as well as the more recently established sphere of intimacy, has been one of the outstanding characteristics of the new realm.  This constant growth, whose no less constant acceleration we can observe over at least three centuries, derives its strength from the fact that through society it is the life process itself which in one form or another has been channeled into the public realm.” (1)

In effect… as every barrier of the past is broken down through the willing permission of new technology in our lives, we are no longer private beings, but everything about us now exists in the public realm.

What do you think about this?  Agree? Disagree?  Is the very features that make the Social Web in the education realm appealing also potentially dangerous?

1.  Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition 2nd edition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998, 45.

2.  Cross posted on the Educator Forum at Classroom 2.o

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