There is a plotline in Arthur Clarke’s “the Light of Other Days” that depicts how society would change if privacy were utterly, totally annihilated. This occurs in the book because some scientists (in the near-distant future) discover how to essentially create microscopic wormholes to view *any point in the world*, and eventually, over the years, this becomes *any point in space and time* (a pretty vast, befuddling concept). An example: Want to see what your aunt is doing in Japan? Send a wormhole from your location to hers, and observe her without her necessarily knowing. Several people in the novel walked around their homes in perpetual darkness, feeling that that was the only way that people watching them wouldn’t be able to see anything.
How would people react to privacy being taken away from them, permanently? Would it depend on their personalities? Their upbringing? The only “privacy” people really kept in this society was what went on in their own minds (unlike Orwell’s 1984, where even that was up for public scrutiny, but I digress) How would you feel if anybody in the world could glimpse what you were doing, whenever they wanted, without you even being aware that they were looking at you? How would you feel knowing that thousands of people could be looking at you now and you having no way to discern who is watching?
The reason I bring this up is because I notice a discernible, steady decrease in privacy, in society, as time goes on.
You happen to be out in the street. Someone snaps a photo of you with their cell phone. They then could upload the photo of you and your location directly onto Youtube, or Facebook, or wherever. Within 5-10 minutes, hundreds of people could theoretically know your name and location.
People can trace your IP addresses.
Someone can take photos of you and post them online, and tag you. Celebrities cannot go to the grocery store without thousands of people knowing their location almost immediately, if someone posts about it on Twitter. (this is part of being famous, admittedly, but regardless..)
Security cameras are in most office buildings, in most gyms, and in most public places in general.
On Facebook, if you get invited to an event and click “I’m attending,” suddenly dozens, if not hundreds, of people, know exactly where you will be on that time and date, and perhaps who you’re going with.
I’m not really calling this phenomenon “bad”, and one might argue that things haven’t really changed much in the last 50 years, just taken different forms.
However, the only place where we are not constantly “watched” is really in our own homes. I wonder where we will be in 100 years?
Just food for thought.
October 7, 2010 at 9:33 pm |
Ceiling cat is watching you masturbate.