AFTER many decades of debate, legislation and court rulings, the United States may be nearing a resolution of the question: Do Americans have a right to privacy?
But the resolution will not be a firm “Yes” or “No,” but a resounding “Never mind.”
Privacy could soon become, like the telegraph and the telex, a relic of the pre-electronic era.
It is not a matter of the increasing intrusion of governments, companies and criminals into the most private of our records and conversations — although that is always worth worrying about. The fault is not in the spies, but in ourselves.
The trend of electronic communication, from Facebook to texting to sexting to Twitter, is more than a record of the advance of technology and ingenuity. It forms the basis of a massive, voluntary flight from the very concept of individual privacy. Every day, millions of people post their thoughts, idle notions, embarrassing revelations and scurrilous opinions — even images of themselves naked physically or psychically — to electronic friends and strangers around the world.
What may feel like the ultimate privacy of the keyboard or the cell phone is, in truth, the loudest megaphone yet invented, and it is a megaphone with a memory. In high school, students behaving badly used to be threatened with a largely mythical “permanent record.” That record was nothing more than a notation on a piece of paper that no one was ever likely to look at.
But now there is a truly permanent record — one that may be copied in electronic storage in thousands of computers. Those records can be found by anyone of skill who cares to look. Who cares to look? Prospective employers, financial institutions, marketing companies and the just plain nosy — in short, the sort of people on whom you would prefer to make a good, or at least a dull, impression.
But on Twitter, it is possible to send, in 140 characters, an aimless message that could inform strangers’ impressions of the sender for years to come.
Can this be a good thing? The question may be pointless. It is the way things are, and, if the past few years are any indication, the drive toward “Living Out Loud” (to borrow a book title from Anna Quindlen) is only accelerating.
The way people communicate and the openness of their communication is changing. That means that the way we judge each other will have to change as well.
People will have to learn to more easily filter silliness, braggadocio and bias from the flying cloud of messages and perceive the worth of the person behind the words.
It may be like trying to distinguish the voice of one bird amid the chatter of a thousand starlings settling into a grove of trees for the night.
Or perhaps the noise will simply become deafening, and we will cease to listen at all.
seriouslyfolks (anonymous) says...
A year ago he would have blamed this on Bush. We all know however it's Al Gore's fault for inventing the internet.;)
May 4, 2009 at 5:23 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )