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Unit 10 Whatever Happened to Privacy?,U10,Additional lnformation for the Teachers Reference,Text Whatever Happened to Privacy?,Warm-up Activities,Further Reading,Writing Skills,Additional Work,Warm-up Activities,1. Can you explain what privacy is with your own words?,2. What are the different attitudes towards privacy in China and the West?,3. What can we do to protect our privacy?,Warm-up,1.1,William Zinsser (1922 - ) is a writer and professor who began his career as a journalist. On October 7, 1922, William Zinsser was born in New York City. After attending Princeton, he served in the U.S. Army during WWII. He returned to New York City after the war, joining the staff of the New York Herald Tribune, where he worked as a feature writer, drama editor, film critic, and editorial writer. In 1959, after thirteen years with the,New York Herald Tribune, he left journalism to become a freelance writer, and for some years he was a regular contributor to major national magazines such as look and life,AIFTTR1.1,Additional lnformation for the Teachers Reference,1. William Zinsser,AIFTTR1.2,magazines and the,New York Times,. In 1970, he joined the English faculty at Yale University. Among his major books are Seen Any,Good Movies Lately,? (1958),The City Dwellers,(1962), and,The Lunacy Boom,(1970). Zinsser is most famous for the modern classic,On Writing Well, a book that grew out of his popular writing class at Yale. Originally published in 1976, the book has come out in six editions, selling well over a million copies (the book has occupied a special place in my library for over 25 years).,Whatever Happened to Privacy,? is chosen from,The Haircurl Papers, a book of essays published in 1964.,AIFTTR2.1,2. Privacy and Right of Privacy in the United States,Privacy is much respected in the United States in terms of social contacts and daily activities. Americans avoid asking questions concerning others income, age especially for women and some other sensitive issues when it seems not to be the appropriate time for raising such questions. For instance one wont ask his friends marital or job-seeking developments when his friend is apparently in a very embarrassing or unpleasant mood. However taboo topics with regard to privacy may vary with the intimacy or personal relations. Privacy-protection is reduced to the least degree when intimate lovers talk, but something still remains untouched and personal even,AIFTTR2.2,among people in love. It also depends on the context. Speakers may not utter any more words than the usual expressions of greeting at a conference, while at a cocktail party casual talks prevail and people seem to tolerate somewhat inquisitive questions.,Right of Privacy is the right claimed by individuals to control the disclosure of personal information about themselves. It also covers peoples freedom to make their own decisions about their private lives in the face of government attempts to regulate behavior.,The Constitution of the United States guarantees a number of privacy rights. The Fifth Amendment, for example, upholds the right to refuse to testify against oneself in a criminal case.,The Fourth Amendment protects a person against unreasonable searches and seizures by government officials. The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that the Constitution also protects privacy in certain matters relating to marriage, reproduction, birth control, family relationships, and child rearing and education.,Privacy is also protected by a branch of civil law called tort law. Under tort law, one person can sue another for violation of privacy in any of four categories: (1) disclosing private facts that are not newsworthy; (2) portraying a person in a false light; (3) using a persons image or personal facts for profit without the persons permission; and (4) intruding into a persons private physical space.,AIFTTR2.3,AIFTTR3.1,3. Privacy on Computer Systems,Computer systems enable many organizations, including government agencies, financial institutions, and health care providers, to collect information on a person without the individuals knowledge. Such information, as well as electronic mail and digital photographs of individuals, can be circulated worldwide on the vast computer network called the Internet.,Organizations collect information on individuals to investigate or prevent crime, to manage vast service programs, or to determine a persons eligibility for or interest in credit, insurance, education, or other services. Since the 1970s, however, Congress and the states have passed laws that restrict,AIFTTR3.2,disclosure of personal information and give individuals the right to challenge the accuracy of information about themselves. These laws cover federal agencies, school records, credit reports, and telephone solicitation. In addition, the law holds that most privileged conversations with lawyers, spouses, clergy, and others are confidential.,Hackers and net criminals also hold responsibilities for the increasingly worsening situation of privacy invasion on the Internet. Hackers may not confine themselves to the secret or illegal gathering of personal information; in some cases they turn into criminals who commit crimes either resulting in the economic loss or leading to more serious libeling or physical harm off the virtual world. The ill-intentioned acts of prying,AIFTTR3.3,into others computers to steal personal data such as password, bank account, address and telephone number are against the rights of privacy and are most likely to be punished. However, the circulation of digital photographs of individuals or rather celebrities are not all ill-intentioned acts. Users circulate photos and email addresses merely for the purpose of sharing with others the information. Until now there seems to be no better ways to deal with those minor violations of privacy on the Internet.,4. Celebrities on TV,Some television stations broadcast many talk shows, also called discussion shows. On these shows, a host interviews people from many walks of life-including athletes, authors, motion picture and TV stars etc. Others also have programs in which journalists and others concerned with current events discuss topics in the news. Politicians may be interviewed about important matters of the day.,Many commercial stations fill time slots by selling broadcast time to companies with products to sell. In TV commercials, celebrities or other spokespersons demonstrate and endorse a product. Direct appeals to purchase the product over the telephone or through the mail are often part of the program.,AIFTTR4,Text,Whatever Happened to Privacy?,Notes,Introduction to the Author and the Article,Phrases and Expressions,Exercises,Main Idea of the Text,Main Idea of the Text,1,Main Idea of the Text,In,Whatever Happened to Privacy,? William Zinsser offers some ideas as to how to understand the invasion of privacy in current America. He examines the growing menace of personal space-invasion, which affects American daily lives. The menace evinces itself, as the author puts it, in two ways, namely the hot pursuit of privacy and the voluntary surrender of privacy. On the one hand, people become more inquisitive of others private affairs and few can still remain all the time sober and vigilant upon the break-in of their own privacy. Or rather to most people there is no good way to ward off prying eyes to take advantage of their weak or thoughtless defense. On the other, some people,Main Idea of the Text,2,apparently seem easily persuaded or tempted to unbosom themselves to the public for fame as well as for money. The mass media fuel the exposure of personal or intimate secrets, especially celebrities in exchange for commercial benefits as well as for large readership, audience or spectators. Shedding privacy even taints the literary circle in that more and more literary men love and indulge in the public promotion of their works on TV or on the radio to highlight their public images. Then the public relations consultant rises, as the time requires the improvement of the public image of his client. As a result, the very concept of protecting privacy is now on the verge of collapse within the media age.,William Zinsser (1922 - ) is a writer and professor who began his career as a journalist. In 1959, after thirteen years with,New York Herald Tribune, he left journalism to become a freelance writer, and for some years he was a regular contributor to major national magazines. Among his major books are,Seen Any Good Movies Lately,? (1958),The City Dwellers,(1962), and,The Lunacy Boom,(1970).,Whatever Happened to Privacy,is chosen from,The Haircurl Papers, a book of essays published in 1964. In this essay, William Zinsser examines the growing menace of personal space-invasion which affects American daily lives.,Introduction to the Author and the article,Introduction to the Author and the Article,Invading other peoples privacy is now a big pursuit and big business in America.,So is the voluntary surrender of privacy, judging by the large number of men and women who seem driven to make an outward show of their inner selves. Newspapers, magazines and television programs are battening as never before on the personal lives of the famous, and,no detail is too intimate to be made public, as President Eisenhower found during his recovery from a heart attack. In fact, anyone who tries to guard his privacy is regarded as somewhat odd and un-American.,Part2_T1,William Zinsser,Whatever Happened to Privacy?,Text,Certainly a mans home is no longer his castle, or, if it is, the moat is dry and the portcullis is always up. Nothing can stanch the daily tide of impersonal mail posing as personal mail, of salesmen at the door and strangers on the telephone. In the hands of the inconsiderate the telephone is a deadly weapon, but if a man dons armor against it by refusing to have his number listed in the directory, he must now pay a penalty. The New York Telephone Company has almost half a million of these,diehards,on its rolls a figure which suggests that the urge for privacy is still alive, even if the respect for it is not. A few years ago the company became impatient with its unlisted patrons and put an extra charge on their monthly bill, hoping thereby to force them back into the listed world of good fellowship.,Part2_T2,Modern architecture has also done its share to abolish privacy. The picture window was first designed by men like Frank Lloyd Wright to frame a scene of natural beauty. Today millions of Americans look out of picture windows into other picture windows and busy streets. The contractor has no sooner finished installing the picture window than the decorator is summoned to cover it with expensive curtains against an inquisitive world. Even then, privacy is uncertain. In many modern houses the rooms have yielded to “areas that merge into each other, so that the husband trying to work in the “reading area (formerly den) is naked to the blasts from the “recreation area (formerly rumpus room) a few feet away.,Part2_T3,Part2_T4,If privacy is hard to find at home, it is almost extinct outside. Strangers in the next seat on trains and planes,are seldom given to vows of silence, and certainly the airline pilot is no man to leave his passengers to their thoughts.,His jovial voice crackles out of the intercom whenever the customers are in any danger of,dropping off,to sleep. Airplanes have also been infested by canned music, leaving the captive listener only one method of escape ,and no method if he wants to live to tell the tale.,Unwanted music is privacys constant enemy. There is hardly an American restaurant, store, railroad station or bus terminal that doesnt gurgle with melody from morning to night, nor is it possible any longer to flee by boarding the train or bus itself, or even by taking a walk in the park. Transistor radios have changed,all that. Men, women and children carry them everywhere, hugging them with the desperate attachment that a baby has for its blanket, fearful that they might have to generate an idea of their own or,contemplate,a blade of grass. Thoughtless themselves, they have no thought for the sufferers within earshot of their,portentous,news broadcasts and raucous jazz. It is hardly surprising that Radio Corporation of America announced a plan that would,pipe,canned music and pharmaceutical commercials to 25,000 doctors offices in eighteen big cities one place where a decent quietude might be expected. This raises a whole new criterion for choosing the family physician.,Better to have a second-rate healer content with the sounds of his stethoscope than an eminent specialist poking to the rhythms of Gershwin.,Part2_T5,If Americans no longer think twice about invading the privacy of others, it is because popular example has demolished the very concept, as anyone with a TV set will attest. The past decade of television has been an orgy of prying and catharsis. Mike Wallace first achieved fame as a TV inquisitor who left no question unasked. To Drew Pearson, for instance, he said, “President Roosevelt once called you a chronic liar; President Truman called you an S. O. B. at one time and a vicious liar at another time. Could it be that you are a liar? Wallace explained why such questions are tolerated: “ Peoples thresholds are lower than they used to be.,Part2_T6,Nor does TV fix its peeping eye only on the famous. Program hosts ooze familiarity, no matter who comes into their net, and sooner or later almost everybody does. How many wretched women were induced to bare their miseries on “Queen for a Day? How many couples exposed their marital troubles to dissection on “Divorce Court? Small legions allowed such retrospective shows as “This is Your Life and “It Could Be You,to conjure up spirits from their unhappy past. Dr. Joyce Brothers had a program on which she answered questions on the sexual problems of her listeners, and Jack Paar in his long tenure on the “Tonight show frequently wheedled the audiences sympathy with tearful complaints about his personal woes.,Part2_T7,Part2_T8,Who can forget his lachrymose return from exile after National Broadcasting Company suspended him? Jabbing at his various enemies, he had a special riposte for Walter Winchell, who, he said, had defamed him and even questioned his virility. “As a moral man, Paar declaimed, “only my wife knows about my virility, and with this touching domestic vignette he routed the foe from his heart.,Even more symbolic of the new age was Ed Murrows “Person to Person. In its seven years more than 550 men and women welcomed this programs million viewers into their homes. They included four Cabinet members, two Supreme Court justices, three college presidents, three bishops, many visiting heads of government, foreign diplomats of highest rank,governors and mayors, Congressmen and judges, generals and admirals, one ex-President and one ex-King of England.,“It was very rare of people to refuse on the grounds that it was an invasion of their privacy, says Jesse Zousmer, former producer of the show. “It became a question of prestige to be on it sort of like being invited to the White House.,While TV programs thus invaded the privacy of men and women as a whole, TV commercials have gone after them limb by limb, and by now they have eroded most of the defenses that once surrounded the human body. When a toddler is old enough to turn a knob, he can see women flexing in girdles or “undies, or rejoicing in the thrust of a new brassiere. He can watch them spray deodorants or dab depilatories on themselves in a state of,Part2_T9,unaccountable rapture, or affix corn plasters to their tortured feet.,Meanwhile, inside their transilluminated systems, little Mr. Aspirin is knocking at the door of the duodenum, Mr. Laxative is dutifully hurrying toward the colon, and Mr. Nasal Decongestant is flushing the eight sinus cavities.,In such an enlightened age, no wonder President Eisenhowers intestinal functions were front-page news. Three days after the Presidents heart attack a spokesman told a news conference, “He had a good bowel movement, and Dr. Paul Dudley White hurried to explain why he had included this extraordinary detail: “The country will be very pleased the country is so bowel-minded anyway to know that the President had a good bowel movement this morning, and it is important.,Part2_T11,Although assaults on privacy come from many sides, it is amazing how many are self-inflicted. Celebrities now disgorge their blackest secrets in print, as if hoping to banish their private demons by serving them at a public feast. From three such confessions an industrious scribe named Gerold Frank has mined one of the richest veins in recent literary annals. Frank is the ghost who put to paper Lillian Roths “Ill Cry Tomorrow, Diana Barrymores “Too Much Too Soon and Sheilah Grahams “Beloved Infidel, books which together have sold 6 million copies and earned more than 750,000, including foreign editions and royalties from the movies that Hollywood avidly made from all three.,Part2_T12,In their books Miss Roth and Miss Barrymore told explicitly how an overdose of husbands and liquor reduced them to squalid depths. “I told him things I wouldnt have told a priest, Miss Barrymore said, and Frank obviously had the same powers of exorcism over Miss Graham. In her book she confessed that her real name was Lily Sheil, which she loathed, and that her upbringing was far shabbier than the one she had invented to conceal it. “The whole of my childhood has been something dark and secret to me, she said, “and the name I was born with is tied up with the years I have kept hidden so long.,Part2_T13,Miss Graham could have kept those years secret forever. They are her business, or at least they would have been so regarded in any era but this one, when theres no business like everybodys business. As for Frank, he moved on to Zsa Zsa Gabor, who promised to tell all, and “McCalls had no doubt that she would, for the magazine paid 100,000 for the rights, thereby giving new momentum to the wave of confessional journalism that has made “McCalls rich and has forced competitors like the “Ladies Home Journal to throw dignity to the winds and join the profitable game of disrobing the great.,Part2_T14,This undressing has even taken literal form. The mother-in-law of painter Larry Rivers once posed for him in the nude, and he exhibited the full-length portrait with the subject identified. During their marriage Tyrone Power and his wife not only had themselves painted nude to the waist, but hung the portraits in their house and invited “Look to publish photographs of them, which “Look gladly did.,Perhaps the snooping instinct has been sharpened by the kind of magazine reporting that digs as deeply into a man as gall and tenacity will permit. Time boasts that its writers and researchers spend weeks trailing the subject of a cover story,Part2_T15,detecting mannerisms that the subjects husband or wife never noticed. These techniques have undoubtedly inspired countless newspapermen, especially those who intrude on a family in their moment of grief after a tragedy.,Serious writing has also suffered strange inroads. Before television, authors generally worked in seclusion while publishers tried to sell their books. Now it is necessary to sell the man as well as the book, and publishers try hard to get their writers onto “Today, “Tonight and other shows moderated by popular hosts, who have thus become literary arbiters with considerable influence. Rare is the author, like J. D. Salinger,Part2_T16,who refuses to undergo this kind of promotion. Meanwhile all sorts of entertainers have suddenly blossomed into “authors and best-selling authors, too. They go from show to show, touting their “b
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