Privacy in Public Venues

The thriving communities of West Virginia at one time embraced the creativity and ideas visitors brought to their small towns.  It was commonplace for entreprenurial West Virginians to engage people from other parts of the United States in order to spur the economic and social progress of their towns.  Such persons were referred to as Boosterists who desired to combine personal gain and public good.  The prospect for personal profit was tied to the growth of the booster's town and to any activity that would "make it easier, cheaper and pleasanter" for people to join his community. 

A visitor, well established professional and a consumer of our town was recently party to concerns over privacy in a public venue.  The descriptive article and comments in The Charleston Gazette led me to question how the communities of West Virginia have evolved from boosters in the 1800's to now supposed privatists in 2009.  I believe there are underlying implications from the photographers incident that will impact the development of Charleston and other communities. 

Specific parties believed their privacy was being encroached upon when photographed.  However, their participation in a public venue would alter certain private rights.  Some state that privacy protects us from unwanted access by others whether it be physical, personal information or attention.  Also noteable is the enactment of the public, which contains multiple groups of diverse people coming together in a mutually physical, mental or idealogical area.  As social and political societies became more established in the late 1700's and early 1800's, distinctions began to evolve about a person's private life in the public sphere.  Jurgen Habermas, renown German philosopher, studied this very evolution in one of his books discussing the disintegration of individual private lives and "public institutions."  People use to work from their homes, maintain their privacy and not discuss their personal problems to total strangers, but this privacy has disintegrated into a public realm where nothing is sacred.  Demands for privacy have changed as the public realm has grown by means of the internet, television, and the media. 

If a boosterist were active today in the same sense as in 1860 and if he or she understood the grander implication of what a visiting consumer to our community offers, then the photographer would have been embraced in the public sphere setting of the Charleston Town Center.  I imagine the photographer would have been asked to utilize his private strengths (photography) to benefit the public community as a whole.  Habermas and the boosters would have encouraged the parents and police officer to engage the photograher.  To have a public conversation encouraging the disimenation of what was believed to have been an encroachment on personal rights to a positive appreciation of what The Charleston Town Center provides to its community members via Santa and The Choir.