On Tiger and Cultural Evolution

There’s not much more that needs to be said about Tiger Woods, and certainly not by me. It’s a strange thing, this fascination. Is his private life completely separate and apart from his professional life as a golfer? Or is there some expectation that, given his endorsements and his public persona, there is an implicit, if not a legal, right for the public to know and care about who he’s married to, who he sleeps with, etc. Hard to say. I can see both sides to be honest.

I think a different and equally interesting point, and one that I’ve thought about in the past, is whether there is a disconnect or a gap between the transparency of our lives, much of it powered by technology, and cultural expectations of public behavior, much of it remnant of an earlier time.

My expectation is that, over time, and with things like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. we will come to demand and expect something less than perfection from our public figures and from ourselves. Yes, it’s not a good idea to post a picture of yourself doing something illegal anywhere. And yes, you need to be careful and watch your words and your actions carefully.

But it seems somewhat unreasonable that we’re still being held to standards of behavior enacted when there was significantly less availability of public information and when social networking tools, and communication tools, hadn’t been developed or advanced.

It would seem that, as people are people and as they live their lives online, and as pictures of them at bachelor parties or other gatherings surface, that one day, and again, over time, it won’t be so shocking when we learn that our public figures are guilty of human behavior. And that we accept it with a bit more sophistication.

Of course, I’m not saying that Tiger running around with a harem of women and paying absolutely no mind to his marital vows is a good thing or anything I condone. I just wonder whether we’re in the midst of an expectation resetting where there becomes a tolerance for a lower standard of public behavior, based on tools like Facebook creating a more realistic expectation of what it means to be human.

Another way of putting it: You can say that, if you’re employed or have any type of third party obligation, you should very carefully monitor your entire public persona. You should hire firms to ensure that no piece of bad information ever surfaces about you on the web. You should not write a blog. You should not post an embarrassing status update on Twitter or Facebook when inebriated. You should either lead a perfect life or work diligently to scrub any public vestige of your imperfect life from existence. Never text. Never email. Be perfect or spend all your time hiding the fact that you’re not.

But on the other hand, at some point, aren’t we all going to have to face up to our real human nature? Rather than constantly seek out, like hyenas and vultures, tales of imperfection, stories of rises and stories of falls that nobody truly believes are, well, true?

Is the point that we shouldn’t live our lives in reality? Or is there a perhaps more empowering point that our cultural media will one day incorporate a more tolerant view, based on the real world? Or maybe this is all already happening and I’m just late to the game.

wendy

My issue with Tiger, vis-a-vis the privacy angle, is that he gives up a certain measure of privacy when he makes the bulk of his (considerable) income off of endorsements, based upon his image as a disciplined, honorable sportsman who is to be emulated. Essentially, he's waived a certain measure of privacy by accepting money in exchange for selling "himself" - and the "himself" isn't just his skill as a golfer. His story - the multiracial prodigy, the squeaky-clean family man who posts pictures of his gorgeous wife and children on his website, the success which relies as much on discipline and hard work as it does on raw talent - is a huge part of why he is so popular, and thus so attractive to sponsors. If he didn't put himself out there for public consumption through his sponsors, but rather lived solely off of his winnings as a golfer, then I think he'd have more standing to simply tell the public to fuck off.

More on point with your post, we can choose what we want to put out there. But we can't complain if what's out there bites us in the ass by revealing us to be hypocrites, or when our lack of discretion paints a picture at odds with the picture we've tried to paint ourselves.

theflyingchange

I agree with all you've written.

My point is somewhat different - namely wondering aloud if institutions
(employers, media networks, endorsers, etc.) will become more tolerant of
discretion and imperfection as more and more humanity (read: information) is
inevitably presented online. It seems somewhat unsustainable to assume that
with texting, status updates, blogs and the wealth of information about all
of us readily available we can maintain the same stance towards indiscretion
we've held in the past. Or not. Just wondering aloud.

wendy

I do think that there is a certain level of increased tolerance for bad behavior - we're not nearly as shocked by certain things now as we might have been 10 or 20 or 30 years ago - but I also think that with the flood of information about people out there now, there is still the hunger for gossip and scandal and schadenfreude. As we become less private, it's inevitable we have to accept a certain level of judgment about our behavior, or otherwise learn to be very, very selective and discrete about what gets out.