Experience and Privacy in The Circle

Throughout The Circle, the concepts of data, privacy, intimacy, and experience are all very prevalent in the novel. With a company as transparent as the Circle, it is hard to avoid thinking about these topics and how they are taken to the extreme.

For me, the two most prevalent themes are privacy and experience. In the novel, these two themes go hand in hand. In The Circle, privacy is seen as something negative, and experiences are only valued if they are shared. If you keep your experiences private, other people won’t be able to learn and benefit from them, so what is the point of having experiences if you don’t tell other people? According to the Circle’s ideas, there is none.

An example of how The Circle believes experiences should be shared rather than kept private is the creation of ChildTrack. This is viewed as benefitting society instead of invading privacy. Francis uses his experiences as a child to create a tracking device chip that is installed in the child’s bone so that they can be tracked at all times. To us, this seems like an invasion of privacy, but because of Francis’ bad childhood experience, he sees no issue with this program. He says “You want a living kid with a chip in his ankle, a kid who you know will grow up safe….or do you want a dead kid?”(pg.90) Because Francis was able to share his negative experience, he was able to create something “positive” from it. Everyone will be able to track the children and parents will finally be able to know the whereabouts of their kids at all times. (pg. 88)

On the other hand, Mae, who wasn’t as open to sharing her experiences at the time, drives home to see her father after finding out he had a heart attack. She ends up spending the weekend there and gets reprimanded upon her return for not sharing what had happened. Josiah mentions to her that if she had opened up about her father’s MS, she would’ve been able to find two other groups on campus that are specifically for children of MS sufferers(pg.183). Because she had kept her family life private and not shared her experiences as the child of a MS sufferer, she “missed out” on the benefit of sharing information about this disease. If she had reached out to those groups, they could have helped her by giving her information on how to react to her situation. If she had shared her experience, she could have provided people with information in case they had a similar experience.

The Circle does not believe in any kind of privacy because if you are holding back your experiences, other people cannot learn from them and know what you are going through so they could help you. Privacy and experience may not be words that you can relate to each other at first glance, but I hope that this was able to help you see how interchangeable they truly are in the Circle.

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