What Mark Twain Can Teach Us About TMI

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I never really stop thinking about digital privacy, but what it brought it back to mind recently wasn’t, surprisingly, the hue and cry about Facebook’s privacy settings, but rather sex and Mark Twain. More specifically, the news that after being sealed at his direction for 100 years, the autobiography of one Samuel Clemens is about to see the light of day. The media has glommed onto the fact that the document contains never-before-revealed details of his affair with his secretary, Isabel Van Kleek Lyon. Apparently, she even bought him an “electric vibrating sex toy” (I am using this information as the basis for patenting an exclusive line of steampunk vibrators, so back off). The relationship eventually soured and Twain devotes no less than a 400-page addendum to bitching out his former paramour in what we can only assume is exhaustive (and emo) detail. Where’s STFUDeadAmericanHumorists.com when you need it?

Twain, however, was actually a canny personal brander a century before the term entered common-ish parlance. By making us wait 100 years for the publication of his autobiography,  he gets the best of the public/private bargain – additional posthumous fame but no damage to his reputation while he was living and a century for his legacy to mature into a mythic status that one little sensationalist self-penned tell-all from beyond the grave will hardly topple.

But was Twain being unduly selfish in not sharing the more salacious details of his life sooner? Perhaps future novelists could have referenced his peccadilloes as a cautionary tale? In a recent issue of TIME, Steven Johnson tries to mount an altruistic case for the digital TMI, namely that sharing your pain could lead to someone else’s knowledge gain. And while it might be true that “somewhere in the world there exists another couple that would benefit from reading a transcript of your lover’s quarrel last night, or from watching it live on the webcam. Even a simple what-I-had-for-breakfast tweet might just steer a nearby Twitterer to a good meal,” that simply reads like so much post-hoc justification for uncensored blabbing. Confessing our foibles online isn’t part of our civic duty and no one can convince me otherwise, not even the 32 California families who agreed to have their every moves filmed for the sake of sociology. Conclusion? Dual-income multi-child families function exactly as researchers expected they would.

It all comes down to control, or at least the illusion of it. We voluntarily share much more (sensitive) information and share it more widely and with people we have lesser connections to than that which sites like Facebook would share about us, but we make a distinction between the info we choose to share (even if our choice is influenced by a culture that tells us the openness is the default and that not sharing is a barrier to trust or, worse, a hallmark of paranoia) and that which is shared on our behalf. The former is our prerogative (ill-advised though it may be), the latter is downright intrusive.  It’s becoming more of a hair-splitting distinction (although I suppose the intent of the share does count for a little something) and a quaint little flail at safeguarding what we believe to be our autonomy of identity and public image.  Alas, not half so quaint (or effective) as waiting a hundred years to finally air our dirty laundry ( all of your drunken college hook-ups would surely be safely six feet under by then…). But we can’t all be Mark Twain, can we?