Private Lives,Public Displays

Here’s the scary part. According to people who should know,personal details of individuals like me are for sale. Who’s buying I know thanks to all those junk calls,but who’s selling? It’s clearly someone who you have handed over quite a few details of your personal life and that’s where it gets murky. Is there a nexus between the credit card companies you have pledged your soul to,and the people providing products and services who may tempt you into spending more on your card? Moreover,thanks to our ever-intrusive,red tape-loving bureaucracy,all those endless forms you filled in when applying for something as innocuous as a gas connection has most of your life recorded on some dusty file in someone’s office,from father’s name and occupation to number of pets and location of surgery scars. The point is that someone is selling all your secrets,dirty or otherwise,and thanks to technology,private lives are getting increasingly public. Julian Assange and WikiLeaks showed that even countries cannot protect their most secret intelligence files,so what are we mere mortals complaining about?

The digital revolution has exposed more of us to total strangers than we really want to,but such is the allure of the medium,and the ego massage,that thanks to the social networking we all do,we happily succumb. Sherry Turkle,professor of sociology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,has written books about how computers and online communication are transforming society. She believes that our culture is undergoing a kind of mass identity crisis,trying to hang on to a sense of privacy and intimacy in a global village of tens of millions. “We have very unstable notions about the boundaries of the individual,” she wrote. The guy whose life story was converted into an Oscar-nominated film,Mark Zuckerberg,has publicly stated that being online means sharing your intimate details with all and sundry. As he said: “The days of you having a different image for your co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly…Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

He calls it radical transparency. I call it deeply troubling. I am not alone. The boss of Google,Eric Schmidt,recently acknowledged the problems “when everything is available,knowable and recorded”. Popular culture and the Page 3 phenomenon already shines its revealing lights on the most intimate corners of our lives,and most of us happily play along. Back in 1980,science fiction writer David Brin wrote a brilliantly prescient novel called Earth,in which he predicted the impending death of privacy. In his fictional world,everyone carried miniature electronic gadgets,recording and videoing every utterance and happening in their lives and downloading it all on to something called the World Net. Today,fiction has become fact. Twenty years ago,if you made a drunken fool of yourself at the office party,the shame would last only as long as your hangover. Today,it’ll be recorded on someone’s cameraphone and from there on YouTube,for everyone including prospective in-laws or employers,to witness your humiliation. I took the Metro the other day for the experience and by the time I reached my destination,I knew some pretty intimate stuff about most people in the compartment,including the woman who was planning to divorce her husband. The mobile phone has cocooned us in its digital embrace and we rarely bother about who’s overhearing our conversations.

Can we fight this? Should we bother? Here’s one man who should know all about the power of the Net,after all he collaborated in creating it. Robert Cailliau,the co-creator of the World Wide Web,says: “I’m not on Twitter,nor Facebook,LinkedIn or any of these systems. They suck in your soul and they will not let you go.” He’s right. I see kids today who spend their lives with friends on Facebook and MySpace,instead of getting a real life and real friends. The Net has probably generated more global wealth and jobs more rapidly than any single technological advance since the advent of electrical power but its also extracted a price: our privacy. The mobile phone has only added to the vulnerability. Utopia or dystopia?

No one’s quite sure.