Jeff Jarvis holds the rather dubious honor of being the high priest of openness. The subtitle of his 2011 book Public Parts clearly expresses his positive view of not keeping things to ourselves:
How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and LiveAnd Jarvis doesn't only talk the talk. He tries to live the life. In August of 2009 he reported on his blog that he had prostate cancer. He wrote:
Why am I even telling you about this? As I wrote in What Would Google Do?, I gained tremendous benefit sharing another ailment – heart arrhythmia – here on my blog. And so I have no doubt that by sharing this, I will get useful advice and warm support (and maybe a few weeks’ respite from trolls). I argue for the benefits of the public life. So I’d better live it.Jarvis underwent surgery for his cancer in 2015. In December of 2017 he decided it was time for an update. On the Huffington Post he wrote:
It has been two years since my surgery and I owe you an update. I am still impotent. I have tried Viagra and Cialis to no effect other than indigestion. I went through the ordeal of shopping for and buying a penis pump (once again being nice to my insurance pool by not buying the one that’s overpriced for those bringing prescriptions; I bought the exact same thing for much less with my own money). It did nothing but mangle and misform my already abused penis and cause pain. I am getting ready to get trained in the art of sticking a needle in my dick to make it engorge, if it still can.Did Jarvis really owe me an update? I'd write that "personally" he didn't owe me anything, but I tend to think that although clearly we don't know each other he feels that it's me, rather than an amorphous readership, that he has a commitment toward. Which makes me more than just a bit uncomfortable. I neither needed nor wanted the details he goes into. Jarvis tends to justify his (to my mind) over-exposure with a nod to the public good: by being public he can help others who somewhere along the line will find themselves with similar issues. That is no doubt a worthy cause, but are the details really necessary? More than anything else it seems that Jarvis decided that our lives should be lived in public and is simply following through on that decision. The fact that he makes his readers into voyeurs doesn't bother him, though I think it should.