This drummer’s changing her beat

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Since the summer is upon us, and many graduate students are going on break, this seems like an appropriate time to shutter the Degrees of Recession. True/Slant will be the new home for my blog, The Not-So Private Parts. (Click here to check out its archives).

In the Not-So Private Parts, I enjoy looking at the ways in which our notions of privacy are changing in the digital age, thanks to the movement of public records online, our embracing the creation of extensive profiles on social networking sites, and the incessant need to let the world know what we’re up to every second of every day (tweet tweet).

My interest in this stems from becoming a blogger on the “widely read legal blog” — as the mainstream media likes to call it — Above The Law. I was surprised by the extent to which I lost my privacy there (i.e., when some of the corporate attorney readers scoured the Net for everything they could find on me, including YouTube videos I forgot existed), and the extent to which I enjoyed writing about the private lives of lawyers, law students, and judges. And, moreover, how easy it was to gather intel on them through Web surfing.

My most recent story was on a class at Fordham Law School invading the privacy of Justice Antonin Scalia. Justice Scalia actually got back to me when I requested a quote for comment. Though he’s not a big believer in the right to privacy, he objected to the privacy invasion for moral reasons, rather than legal ones. (See his full response.)

Does our morality need to change? Do our laws need to change? Do we need to get used to living exposed lives? Do we we all just need to be more careful in crafting our Facebook privacy settings?

I look forward to bringing you more on such topics. Welcome to the Not-So-Private Parts.