public identity

So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, nonindividual activities that this age forces on all of us.

-- George Orwell, "Why I Write," 1946

The violence that all electric media inflict on their users is that they are instantly invaded and deprived of their phyiscal bodies and are merged in a network of extensions of their own nervous systems. As if this were not sufficient violence or invasion of individual rights, the elimination of the phyiscal bodies of the electric media users also deprives them of the means of relating the program experience of their private, individual selves, even as instant involvement suppresses private identity.

-- Marshall McLuhan, "Violence of the Media," Canadian Forum, 1976