The threat to privacy emanates no more from a hidden camera in a changing room or a leering neighbour. The threat now is just a mouse click or a remote button away.
If unconvinced, consider the success of reality shows and the wide range of audience they are managing to target.
While deriding the tamasha that TV is making of an ordinary person’s life is easy, so many of us are going ahead and doing things that add to a market researcher’s understanding- ‘peek a boo’ clicks with all.
If it did not, Big Boss would never have Rahul Mahajan and Monica Bedi on board. If it did not, Miss Sawant could never pass off as a swayamvar worthy bride.
If it did not, people would choose not to twitter minute to minute account of their lives or post orkut, facebook and gmail status messages.
I almost spat my coffee when some girls I was meeting for the first time, casually discussed, what some celebrities were up to according to their twitter updates. Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!
When orkut became trendy, all it took was an anonymous profile, invisible status, name search and reading through scrapbooks to know the life puran of that girl you had met briefly on the train. When orkut came up with the option to lock scrapbooks, many people were forced to find an alternative pastime.
Facebook like the wordpress came up with more fun options but made privacy sound a bit more like the dodo. I suddenly was receiving emails informing me of what a friend’s friend was doing on her birthday night without even spooking around. Consider this-I have 25 facebook friends. The 25 friends on an average have 60-80 friends. If I post a picture on facebook, atleast 2000 people could be viewing it for no reason but that it popped on their facebook sidepage.
Blogging with its more verbose and graphic style takes voyuerism a step forward.
While I cannot controvert the talent of some of the bloggers, I will maintain that for many of us, blogreading is spicy due to the reams of personal details that bloggers carelessly let out in their posts. (ise kehte hai aa bail mujhe maar strategy!).
I am not against social networking and voyeurism but the lack of control on who can be privy to my information scares me at moments.
The level of hypocrisy it creates, appalls me too. There was a time when friends asked me for my opinion, because they believed it was genuine. Today the number of goody responses to photos and declarations of what one believes in or is doing, has made that ‘touch’ unnecessary’ and unwanted.
