As time goes by I spend more and more time on Zoom. While doing so, it has been noticeable that (putting on my sociological hat) the distinction between public spaces and private spaces is being steadily eroded. People behave more and more, in a wide variety of situations, as if they are in their own private spaces, even if what they are doing is staking part in some kind of public activity.
This tendency is much older than the current pandemic. (Do you remember the controversy about people going to the supermarket in their pyjamas?) It is also a long-term drift. It first became noticeable to me working in the university. When I was a student in the early sixties students always referred to their teachers by their titles, and the latter addressed students as “Mr.-” or “Miss “So-and-So”. It was common for men to wear hats out of doors (and I don’t mean beanies). Even as late as the ‘nineties of the last century, academics (and I believe business people also) often wore suits to conferences and similar occasions. The phrase “Sunday best” actually referred to something in experience.
That sense of formality in public spaces has been eroded steadily, and is not only visible in dress, but also modes of address, and the verbal style of communication. (When did you last write a letter beginning, “Dear Sir or Madam”?) This movement has become really visible with contemporary modes of communication. I received an email yesterday from the administrator of a gallery, couched in first name terms, although we have never met. Zoom meetings are the leading edge of this, which is hardly surprising as they are conducted as often as not from our own homes. My wife noticed the other day somebody eating what appeared to be a bowl of breakfast cereal while taking part in a church service. I was interested to see yesterday a leading scientific figure being interviewed by the BBC for a news programme, wearing a T-shirt.
Don’t get the wrong idea. I am not writing in the spirit of “Disgusted of Tonbridge Wells”. This is simply an anthropological field observation. Society and culture are changing before our eyes, and I believe that the current pandemic has been a contributory factor in this process, although only intensifying changes that were already well under way. I am left with the question, however, of the possible limits to this process. What is the nature and extent of the areas of life and behaviour that we really would still defend as private? Or, to put it another way, “Are there really no more private parts?”