New technology connects us, but in a world where you’re only ever a swipe away from other people’s thoughts, where do you keep your own?

Private faces in public places

Are wiser and nicer

Than public faces in private places

WH Auden

“How important is it that we no longer write diaries?” the playwright James Graham asks me. “I wrote a diary as a 14-year-old boy. I had the freedom to chew through some things I wasn’t sure about, to say some things I knew would never be seen by anybody. I don’t do that anymore. If I have a thought, I tweet it.”



I meet James Graham in a sandwich bar in Soho, central London. The seat I choose is directly below a speaker. The radio is on and it is loud. Graham wrote This House, The Vote and Privacy. He tells me that he worries we’re losing grip of truly private spaces, places where we can be alone and think things through. I resist the urge to tweet this.

I wonder about our immediate response to things – if the first thing that we think is the thing that we really think

“I wonder about our immediate response to things, be it a massacre in Paris or a relationship breakup – I wonder if the first thing that we think is the thing that we really think. Whether we’ve lost the ability to go away, sit down in the dark without anything blinking and ask what we really think about this, instead of going, ‘What should I think about this? How can I phrase it in a pithy 140 characters?’ If we’re losing that ability I don’t know what that means for democracy. I don’t know what that means for politics. I don’t know what that means for healthy relationships, rhetoric, discussion, ideas, art.”

Graham’s impression is that, while Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA and GCHQ have given people a greater awareness of their data, it hasn’t necessarily made them care all that much about it – at least not beyond initial, retweeted, outrage. The problem, he says, is that we’ve not been pitching privacy in the right way.

“It’s such an abstract intellectual concept. It’s not something we feel, so to make people care is almost impossible. That’s why the usual tactic to make people scared doesn’t actually work,” he tells me.

“I think whenever you try and get people – my mum – to care about it they instinctively think it’s about people stealing your stuff or data or identity. I don’t think that’s the big issue. I think it’s about how it’s changing us emotionally, how we have relationships with people, how we have relations with the government or with a girlfriend or boyfriend. That’s the important stuff that we’re not having a massive conversation about.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest How many teenagers still keep a diary over tweeting or posting on Snapchat? Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Diaries pop up several times during our conversation. For Graham they represent a space we’re rapidly losing grip of – somewhere separate from the public brand version we project of ourselves. It harks back to a pre-digital nostalgia many in my generation are likely to have, one foot on either side of the internet tectonics; a teenager alone in a bedroom, sans smartphone, sans Wi-Fi, scribbling thoughts into a diary to be read by no one else. It’s a nice image, but the idea of a teenager’s bedroom as a private sanctuary isn’t, I learn a few days later, all that old.

There is a private room in my house

“There are a number of reasons why the idea [of a teenager in a bedroom] has become possible, not least of which is to do with central heating,” David Dewing, director of the Geffrye Museum of The Home, tells me over Skype.

“In the days when I was a teenager, households rarely had central heating, and certainly central heating upstairs was pretty unlikely, so there were times of the year when you only went upstairs when it was time for bed and you got straight in because it was warm. The notion of sitting in your room and doing something in the evening wasn’t there – you just wouldn’t have done it because it was freezing cold.”

It’s not just teenagers’ rooms. Dewing tells me that the divide we take for granted between public and private in our homes has changed throughout history. If you go back to the 18th century, for example, you’d find parts of the family house almost completely open to the public.

I think nowadays we’re beginning to feel it’s quite rare to be invited into someone’s house David Dewing, Geffrye Museum director

“If you go right back to the notion of a grand aristocratic house or a palace, there were places where all sorts of people would turn up and mill about, and then the closer you got to the head of the household you went through a succession of barriers which got you into more and more private spaces,” he says. “A domestic or suburban townhouse in the 19th century had the same sort of feature. I think nowadays we’re beginning to feel it’s quite rare to be invited into someone’s house.”

Why are we visiting each other’s houses less? The answer has a lot to do with technology. “Socialising in people’s home was a very important way in which society connected with itself in the 19th century,” Dewing explains. “But then the telephone comes along. It means you can keep in touch with people without having to pay visits on them all the time.”

When you have the telephone, and by extension high-speed broadband, there is little need to constantly visit your friends in person. Communication becomes almost instantaneous and the architecture of our homes adapts to new functions as a result. Imagine a beehive of cells collapsing.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘We’ve taken down as many of the walls as we possibly can.’ Photograph: Alamy

“Inside the home we’ve taken down as many of the walls as we possibly can - we still have walls around our bedrooms and bathrooms but everything else is pretty much open,” says Dewing. “Because we’re all within one household we’re all fairly relaxed with what we’re doing. So you could say that behind the front door there’s a space which is very open.”

In one sense, then, the entirety of the home has become a private space. In another, the network of communication in our pockets means that there’s almost always outside voices beyond our front door. We are masters of our houses, but we are constantly beset by visitors.

There is a private room in my head

“The ego is not master in its own house,” wrote Sigmund Freud. In the professional practise of the author, academic and psychoanalyst Josh Cohen there is a stripped-down version of the couch made famous by Freud. I do not sit on it. Joshua Cohen perches opposite me and talks in measured words about privacy.

“Sometimes people talk about privacy having been invented somewhere in the 19th century, and I think this ties to a particular kind of politics which says that privacy is essentially a kind of bourgeois concern, that it’s premised on the privilege of having enough private space in which to be private,” he explains.

“I’m suggesting that if one reads the history of culture differently, then there’s always been an internal conception of privacy, and that internal privacy is an essential dimension of the human being.”

For Cohen, privacy is very much about an obscure and impenetrable dimension of the self. “In order to be a being that opens out and interfaces with the external world, there has to be an interior from which one emerges and into which one can again withdraw,” he tells me. “And in a way that kind of inaccessible, unknown, interior self conditions the possibility of an exterior self.”

The balance between interior and exterior selves sounds comprehensive enough, but Cohen says that getting people to accept there is an obscure, inaccessible part of their psyche isn’t always easy in a society that thrives on bouts of outward, quantifiable expression. “There is a certain kind of contempt for what I would call unconscious life in our culture,” Cohen tells me. “A certain contempt for the idea that there is anything in us that can’t be quantified, externalised, instrumentalised.”

Cohen tells me that social networks present a misleading version of private expression.

“It might seem that we’re very much in contact with our private selves, that in fact we’ve entered a golden age of privacy with confessional talk shows and an unprecedented freedom and openness opened up by social networking and other technologies.

“The problem with thinking of it in that way is of course that we value only what can be externalised, what can be shown and seen, there is a kind of slippage where what gets lost is something like the unconscious. What gets lost is, in other words, the possibility that it’s harder to translate your interior life than confessional culture imagines.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘There is a certain kind of contempt for what I would call unconscious life in our culture.’ Photograph: Ray Tang/REX Shutterstock

I talk to Cohen about Instagram, about selfies, and about how attempts to express the self can be difficult once you get past superficialities. Go deeper than pictures of your face, and showing yourself becomes a difficult thing to do. “I think that people discover self expression as some unproblematic imperative. And when you discover it as a problem then, yes, you start to get in contact with that dimension of privacy of the unconscious.”

We may be encouraged to think about ourselves in terms of open-plan architecture, easily sorted into blueprints of favourite films and local coffee shops, but Cohen suggests that this floor plan doesn’t match reality – that there are places where the walls in our head remain, where the light is switched off and something moves in the dark. These are private spaces, and being private is a way to cultivate the strangeness of the self to itself.

Changing the argument about privacy

When James Graham talks to me about writing in diaries, I try to remember my room as a teenager. I didn’t write in a diary but I did stick a lot of things on my walls. Pictures, posters, lines cut from headlines, phrases glued together, sketches, doodles. I didn’t put those things on the walls so that I could tweet them. If I did the same thing now, I probably would have.

People always think of privacy in terms of, what have you got to hide? It can be the best thing about you

“I think it’s a question about shame. People always think of privacy in terms of, what have you got to hide? That privacy is about what you’re ashamed of, your flaws, your weaknesses, your negative sides, your secrets, your scandals, your peccadillos, your fetishes,” Graham says.

“I think it can be about the best things about you. The things that you love. The things that are just yours and you don’t have to share because you just love them and you don’t need other people to know that you love it. Can we turn the conversation around from ‘What have you got to hide?’ to being something more positive and fulfilling than that about the value of us having a free space where you can make mistakes, think things that are wrong, try things out that don’t affect your opportunities or life choices.”

As Graham says, we need to shift the argument around privacy. We can’t arbitrarily defend an abstract notion of privacy and expect everyone to care. Instead, we need to talk about the cultural, emotional, psychological impact of surveillance culture. We need to remember why private spaces are important, and celebrate what they can nurture.