<p>Nowadays nothing is private: our culture has become too confessional and self-expressive. People think that to hide one’s thoughts or feelings is to pretend not to have those thoughts or feelings. They assume that honesty requires one to express every inclination and impulse.</p>
<p>Adapted from J. David Velleman, "The Genesis of Shame"</p>
<p>Assignment:
Should people make more of an effort to keep some things private? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations.</p>
<p>---------------------------------------------------------------------- ESSAY:</p>
<p>People should try to be as independent as possible, thus one should share some, but not all of his thoughts and feelings with his surroundings. In the contemporary society there are countless ways in which we are stripped of our privacy and uniqueness, becoming more and more alike, destroying the value of feelings and integrity. Several literary works and everyday situations clearly exemplify this notion.</p>
<p>In the novel 1984 by George Orwell, we can see a nation living without any privacy at all. There are cameras in every home, monitoring one's every move, action, and even thought. We can observe the transformation of mankind, which is falling into a dull, stupefied stupor, expressionless and thought-mortified. There is no difference between people, who are more of a kind of mindless zombies than human beings. This is all a consequence of possessing no privacy. Our private life is what distinguishes us from others, rendering us interesting to one another, fully using our imagination and creativity, developed exactly from those brief moments of spent alone at home, or anyplace where we feel at peace, secluded and secure. </p>
<p>If we look at the contemporary world, we can see many alarming factors looking like just milder variations of Orwell's novel. Reality shows, monitoring people 24/7, electronic chips installed in people's IDs, even bodies, satellites orbiting the Earth, and so many more means of knowing where we are, and what we are doing. Furthermore, the media constantly pressures us to express our feelings to everyone, the more publicity, the better. Marriage proposals at huge baseball stadiums, basketball courts, love messages by airplanes, all in order to publicize our love or affection for another person.</p>
<p>The way in which mankind is moving is alarming. It is clear from these examples that humanity as a whole should try to save the little privacy that it has left.</p>