Recognition trumps personal privacy when the spied-upon help the spies
The greatest fear is anonymity and a loss of visibility,
ONE of the greatest problems of our time, and one that seems to preoccupy virtually everybody nowadays, is the growing threat to our privacy.
In the simplest of terms, we take “privacy” to mean that everyone has the right to go about his own business without anyone else — especially agencies linked to centres of power — finding out about it. So dearly do we value our privacy that we have established institutions and regulations to safeguard it.
These days, our conversations often turn to how worried we are that someone might hack into our credit card records and find out what goods we have purchased, which hotels we have stayed in, or where we have eaten dinner. Never mind the fear that our phones might be tapped without just cause: the British telecommunications company Vodafone recently sounded the alarm about more or less secret agents in several countries accessing information about whom we talk to and what we say on the phone.
Judging by how we talk about privacy, it would seem that we hold it as sacred, as something to be defended at all costs, so that we do not end up living in a society ruled by George Orwell’s proverbial Big Brother — an all-seeing entity monitoring our every action and perhaps even our every thought.
But, judging by our behaviour, do we actually care that much about privacy? Consider this: there was a time when the greatest threat to a person’s privacy was gossip; people were afraid of their dirty laundry being aired in public, worried that it might damage their reputations. These days, however, as so
Perhaps submitting to such exposure is the only way to feel truly alive and connected
many of us struggle with how to define ourselves in the modern world, there is a greater threat than the loss of privacy: the loss of visibility. In our fast-moving, hyperconnected society, so many of us just want to be seen.
And so, today, a woman who prostitutes herself (and who, in the old days, would have tried to conceal her trade from her family and neighbours), advertises herself as an “escort” and adopts a public role, perhaps even appearing on television. Couples who once might have kept their relationship troubles private now appear on trashy TV shows, revealing themselves to be adulterers or cuckolds, and are met with applause.
The stranger sitting beside you on the train bellows into his cellphone what he thinks of his sister-in-law or what his tax adviser should do. And the subject of a high-profile police investigation — who, in another era, might have left town or laid low at home, waiting for the wave of scandal to pass — may instead ramp up his public appearances, because it is better to be a notorious thief than an honest but anonymous man.
The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman recently wrote in La Repubblica about the power of Facebook and other social media to make people feel connected to one another. This brought to mind a piece Bauman wrote for the Social Europe Journal in 2012 in which he discussed how social media, as a way of keeping tabs on people’s thoughts and emotions, could be harnessed by various powers interested in surveillance.
Bauman pointed out that, ultimately, such violations of privacy were possible thanks to the enthusiastic participation of the very people whose privacy was being violated. He argued that “we live in a confessional society, promoting public self-exposure to the rank of the prime and easiest available, as well as arguably most potent and the sole truly proficient, proof of social existence”.
In other words, for the first time in the history of humanity, the spied-upon are collaborating with the spies to simplify the latter’s task.
Moreover, the average person draws satisfaction from surrendering his privacy when it allows him to feel as though others truly “see” him. (Never mind if what they see is him behaving like an idiot or even a criminal.)
Once we are able to know absolutely everything about everyone else, the excess of information will only produce confusion and white noise. This ought to worry the spies but not the spied-upon, who seem content with the idea that they and their most intimate secrets are known to friends, neighbours and even enemies.
These days, perhaps submitting to such exposure is the only way to feel truly alive and connected.
We pay a lot of lip service to worrying about privacy. But if actions speak louder than words, then our privacy does not seem to matter all that much to us. At least, not as much as recognition does. —
© The New York Times News Service Eco is the author of the international bestsellers ‘Baudolino’, ‘The Name of the Rose’ and ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’, among others. Translated from Italian by Alastair McEwen