Privacy, time and fairy lights

Just about everyone is communicating more - and in more ways - than ever and this naturally has an effect on our ideas of privacy.

More and more personal information is stored in data centers and much of that is potentially retrievable by anyone, but the very volume of data out there is perhaps our best protection. Most of the trivial stuff is lost and will never be retrieved - and, even if it was, what would it matter?

Breaches of privacy matter only when one's life is disrupted - for example when one's bank account has been tampered with, or one's friends alienated or offended, or one's house broken into.

As technologies change so do - and must - attitudes. Younger people are clearly less concerned about making information about (and images of) themselves public than previous generations were. There were always teenage exhibitionists, even if today's technologies allow exhibitionism on a much larger scale. The class clown has gone global, the school rebel is part of a worldwide protest movement.

But for every natural rebel or exhibitionist, then and now, there are sure to be many more individuals who have no difficulty maintaining their privacy and dignity and sense of balance.

Some changes are deeper, however. Technologies like the printed book and pen and paper encouraged silent, private reading and writing. And, significantly, the communication process is delayed in these instances and long periods of time elapse between the writing and the reading, months or years in the case of books, days or weeks in the case of letters or periodicals.

By contrast, digital technologies facilitate instant communication with peers in a context of high levels of sensory stimulation so that the private sphere of the silent reader is being crowded out.

This is the real problem for anyone who values minds attuned to slower-moving and important things, companions who sit quietly over a coffee, and who, when they talk, take you into a slower, deeper world where thoughts are more like grand orbiting planets than flickering fairy lights.

But then, fairy lights have their charm...

No sense of place

I have recently been reading some Patricia Highsmith novels* from the 1950s and 60s. Three communication media - the old-fashioned letter, the (usually local) newspaper and the telephone - all play very significant roles in these stories. (There is also the occasional telegram - or cable - and books also appear.)

Some of Highsmith's central characters spend a large proportion of their allotted pages planning and writing letters, posting letters, organizing the material for writing more letters, waiting for letters and speculating as to why no letter has come or, more rarely, receiving a letter and analysing the contents. The local newspaper is good for keeping track of whether the body has been found or what stage the police have reached in their investigation. And the telephone looms as large as in the movies of the period.

In their way, each of these media enhances the sense of place and/or the sense of distance from other places. Even the telephone signals the sense of distance by the involvement of an operator.

Patricia Highsmith's world may not be the real world of the 1950s and 1960s - it is a slightly claustrophobic and chilling distillation of reality - but it reflects important truths about the crucial role communication technologies play in weaving a cultural milieu and defining a locality.

As traditional letters disappear from the communication landscape, as print is replaced by digital devices, and the telephone operator is remembered only in the "Operator! Operator!" of old films and TV, we are inexorably losing our sense of place.


*The blunderer, This sweet sickness, Those who walk away and The tremor of forgery.