Yesterday, when the space shuttle disintegrated, the event was recorded by at least five cameras. Not one of them was an official government camera.

This is a significant thing: 20 years ago there would have been no record of the event, unless the government had initiated a program -- and allocated significant funding -- to film the entire flight. But today everyone has his or her own video camera. Thus, in a wholly natural and organic way, without any planning, the event was recorded from multiple points of view.

We are becoming a vastly more connected society: there is less mystery.

My thoughts then wander to the subject of privacy, which is such a concern as we contemplate the Internet. It occurs to me that the prevailing notion of privacy is mostly a contemporary, urban construct. In the large city, or in the vast expanse of suburbs and malls, one can disappear. We begin to think that this is normal, or even ideal.

But even today, in a small town on the rollling hills of Iowa -- just as in a medieval european town -- who can disappear? Families have known each other for generations. There are few secrets.

Certainly, one must be prudent about protecting one's privacy. But as the Internet makes us less mysterious to each other, perhaps our standard of privacy needs to depart the modern urban/suburban sense of disappearance -- an historic aberration in human sociology -- and return to the more normal human sense of privacy, which is that of small town mutual familiarity.

Perhaps in the Internet age we will pick the people who will form our small town, but within that group there is the potential for much familiarity. We will be known to each other. One loses the advantages of anonymity in order to gain the advantages of community. Is that entirely a bad thing? Perhaps; but it's certainly the more normal human thing.