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Abstract

In the post-modern “flow” culture, in a world with a prevailing global stream of mass distribution of images, designating and retaining borders between the private and the public becomes increasingly difficult. Privacy, sometimes defined in opposition to that, which is public, seems to be an abstract construct, since the poles of this dichotomy are not either parallel, or entirely antithetical. The changes that occurred in the public life sphere during the past two centuries have significantly influenced the functioning of culture, irreversibly — it seems — changing the relations between the public and the intimate. The lability and instability of such notions, as “intimate”, “private”, and “public”, is not only a signum temporis of the ever-changing world, but also a kind of a handy key to unlock complicated awareness changes, which are increasingly noticeable and demand a comprehensible commentary. It doesn’t mean that these concepts ever had any universal explications and clearly established bounds. On the contrary — there is not one delineation of this triad, and its meaning can only be revealed by means of an analysis of systemic variables: geography, history, and culture. The understanding of these concepts also differs in terms of the type of scientific narration or the field, in which they are used (sociology and anthropology, social psychology, cultural sciences, media sciences, the language of politics and political science, law) and in which they have specific connotations as a result of subject references and scopes determined by their virtue. It is obviously impossible to negate collective components of historically variable categories, but the article emphasizes semantic shifts, which — like is the case with intimacy, for example — are difficult to understand without referring the modernization of marriage, initiated wit the appearance of the idea of romantic love, the “discovery” of a child, the pattern-making role of motherhood, the birth of the modern notions of “family” and “home”. The shape of the triad in question — especially during the last couple of decades — has been influenced by the transformation of contemporary communities into “media societies”, which often force a specific character of intimate, private, and public life. Electronic technologies alarmingly oust emotions, closeness, and engagement. As a result of detachment from family-, love- and friend-related communities, intimacy becomes a value less clearly connected to privacy, but possible to be experienced — or found — in any circumstances. It becomes diffused in the multitude of social interactions, which include them, the flood of images and social practices of (auto)presentation, but at the same time wherever it unceremoniously circulates as an element of the style of exchange, a product, or a sign — its actual value decreases.