Changes in the technology of communication are occurring so
rapidly that we human beings now move through a cloud of messages
as dense as a locust-storm. Every new device increases the speed
and the outreach of the last, and young people are now governed by
the gadgets in their hands, which don’t merely contain their lives
but also to a great extent dictate them.
Of course, the print media still exist. There are old-fashioned
people like myself who make a living by writing things, and
old-fashioned people like you, who support us by reading, or at any
rate buying, what we write. But maybe it’s only people like us (if
I can presume to include you) who are able really to regret the
changes that are sweeping away so much that we depended upon. The
rest of the world is caught up in the torrent of gadgets, each new
model designed to relieve its owner of one more source of mental
exercise or one more obstacle to fun. Memory now exists behind a
screen. Very little is stored in our heads, and our recollections
drift in cyberspace like asteroids, unconnected to the orbit in
which we move.
A university teacher can no longer assume that a student has any
use for books or even knows how to open one. Written letters are a
thing of the past, and essays are downloaded from the sites devoted
to them. Research means surfing the web, and as for social
life—this is a matter of tweeting and twittering as one drifts
through cyberspace. Facebook friendships bubble up in a moment, and
consist in a mutual agreement between strangers to put themselves
on display. More and more does it seem that putting yourself on
display is what it is all about, that there is nothing more to love
and friendship than being mutually visible. Intimacy and privacy
are dreams of the oldies, who live down there with their feet in
the mud, and don’t know how to launch themselves into the
ether.
The distinction between the private and the public is therefore
no longer clear. If your private life consists largely of displays
in cyberspace, and if friendship means access to those displays,
then it is hardly an offense to look. The stuff that is sent around
the ether by way of self-advertisement is there for all to read and
see, and the one who complains that his privacy has been invaded,
when personal correspondence or embarrassing photographs are
suddenly public possessions, has only himself to blame—not for
posting the material, but for being embarrassed by it. There is no
real dividing line now, between intimacy and exposure, and people
are rapidly losing the sense that hacking into another’s
correspondence is a form of theft, or displaying intimate images is
a form of assault. If your target is a government you can even
become a hero, like Julian Assange, simply by displaying what
others have wanted to hide.
One result of this is that the old laws of libel and defamation
are falling into disuse. People can no longer protect themselves by
suing the source of malicious gossip, and in any case the
distinction between the true and the false is less and less
relevant to the messages posted on the web. Anybody who has the
slightest ability to attract the attention of the twittering
classes will find lies, fabrications, fantasies, and lunatic
accusations attached to his name in the cyber-sphere as well as
true revelations that he would rather have kept to himself. In such
circumstances to protest at all is to protest too much. For abuse
is less and less perceived as such: the twitterers dismiss
everything with a flap of the wings and blow another tweet.
Of course it is, officially, a crime to hack into other people’s
correspondence, and those journalists who explored the messages of
celebrities on behalf of Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers have had to
pay a severe price, with several of them now in jail. But they
acted in the same spirit as the intrusive journalists of former
times who kept vigil from the house across the road, or who
followed celebrities on motorbikes. Only the technology had
changed. The left-wing Guardian newspaper mounted its high
horse in condemnation of Rupert Murdoch’s empire, implying that
journalists of leftist convictions would never stoop so low. As
someone whose e-mails have been stolen and published by the
Guardian, I found this less than convincing. But it
reminded me that journalists have always breached the bounds of
privacy when they thought they could get away with it. What has
changed is the technology of communication, which has implied that
there are no longer any bounds to breach. People carry round their
lives in a gadget, which they might leave behind on a train for
anyone to pick up or throw away.
COMMUNICATION IS NOT like other human actions, something that we
might feel free not to engage in. It is the essence of human life.
We are social creatures, whose personalities emerge from our
interactions; all that we value and all that we fear has its source
in communication. Hence these gadgets, which change the form and
the scope of our communications, are less our servants than our
masters. The adventures to which they tempt us are easy to embark
on and seem to be entirely without danger. We travel round the
world with the click of a mouse; we visit friends and strangers on
the screen, twitter into the void and post on our Facebook walls
all the things we want the world to know. We sit at our desks and
enjoy every kind of thrill at no cost in danger. So we think. In
fact we are caught in the worldwide web like flies, wriggling in
the suffocating bonds of communication. And we don’t know the way
back; we are sitting at our desks, but far, far indeed from
home.
As we now know, it is not only messages but also images that can
get stolen and shown to the world. What an adventure, to take a
picture of yourself all naked, and send it to your boyfriend of the
moment. The cell phone is there, asking you to do it. And what’s
the problem, when nobody sees? Unfortunately what one person sees
everyone can see. Women discover their nude image in the cell
phones of friends and enemies, in the fantasies of strangers, in
the lustful plans of predatory men and displayed all over
cyberspace. How to get back home from this one? We should not be
surprised that one girl, unable to live with her prostituted image,
has committed suicide, and that celebrities like Scarlett Johansson
are now vainly trying to rub their naked bottoms off a million
computer screens.
The problem is not the use to which the gadget has been put, but
the gadget itself. These gadgets full of messages stand at the door
of your life, asking to take over. And young people, who have no
defenses against them, very quickly invite them in. Parents like to
think that, by providing their child with such a gadget, they are
providing him or her with a mere instrument, something that can be
used for legitimate purposes that already exist—like letting your
parents know where you are and when to collect you. In fact they
are providing their child with a new master, one designed to take
over the person who holds it.
