C21st living: act locally, be surveilled globally?

Bill Thompson writes:

Those of us living in the west, with cheap easy access to computers and the internet and a sophisticated technological infrastructure surrounding us, are increasingly living our lives online.

This is no more frightening than any other vast social change, but it will be resisted by many who see in the loss of privacy something threatening, who believe it is dangerous or dehumanising or somehow against nature.

But we should never forget that we make human nature, it is not given to us, and we can therefore remake it.

Our modern conception of privacy and of the nature of the individual is a product of the industrial age that is now passing, so it should not surprise us that we are finding new ways of constructing an identity online.

As I spread myself around over the network, updating my Facebook profile, commenting on MySpace, flying through Second Life, blogging, twittering, updating my calendar and posting photos and videos and audio I am finding a new way to be Bill Thompson.

While it's a nice sentiment, I think we need to consider the broad sense of Bill's notion of "remaking human nature" in the context of the insights of evolutionary psychology: our psychological experience is founded on our evolutionary heritage, which has, for example, seemingly optimised us for social interaction within relatively small groups.

However, at the same time, I wholeheartedly agree with the previous clause of the same sentence: that "our modern conception of privacy and of the nature of the individual is a product of the industrial age that is now passing." I have myself argued that, in a world where information flows ever more freely and pervasively, we have no choice but to completely re-conceive the role of privacy in our lives. Given the relatively recent provenance (as Bill points out) of the Western concepts of privacy and individual identity, it seems likely that their roots only penetrate the topsoil of our culture rather than the deep clay of our evolutionarily selected traits (such as our predeliction for interacting within small groups), so it may be that we can reinvent this aspect of our experience.

Perhaps we will continue to seek out small groups to engage with proactively while at the same time coming to tolerate, accept or even enjoy the fact that our audience for that engagement may be unknowably diverse and global.

My question remains:

How can we find sustenance and protection for our intricate and bounded, biologically-evolved, deeper, softer selves in the always-on "surface" world we are creating?