THIRTY COLUMNS AGO, I wrote an essay titled BlackBerry Sheep. It was a direct counter to John Stuart Mill’s thesis in defence of individual freedom that “men are not sheep”.
In fairness to the great 19th century thinker, he published On Liberty in 1859, a good 150 years ago. George Orwell, almost a hundred years later, came closer to today’s reality, although it would be a quarter century before the raw accuracy of his Nineteen Eighty-Four became clear.
In BlackBerry Sheep, I noticed how eagerly people are willing to give up privacy in exchange for being connected. These days, privacy and virginity are so easily surrendered!
In March 2007, I wrote: “It seems to me that in this 21st century real freedom is going to be experienced only by those who will be able to disconnect themselves from the technology around and about us.”
Disconnect needed
On that occasion I found myself in agreement with Mill’s notion that remaining human requires us to sometimes disconnect from society, to remain private. The alternate is the tyranny of the majority and the death of individual liberty.
The more connected we become, the lonelier we are. Far from socializing humanity, the technology makes us more cruel, unkind and uncaring.
How else would you describe the person who comes up on a tragic road accident with a human being like herself writhing in pain as her life ebbs away at the side of the road and whips out a smartphone and records the agony . . . and immediately broadcasts it – not only to Barbados – but to the planet?
And what about the young man who learns via his BlackBerry that his dear mother has passed away just a few minutes earlier, only hours after he had left her bedside and gone to work? Couldn’t a relative have been the first to break the sad news before the event “went viral”?
“Social networking” is the new “in” thing as life becomes more and more lived in public view.
American novelist Walter Kirn recalls that in the industrial age the ideal of privacy was taken for granted as the dominant cultural norm. Today, the ideal of publicness becomes the default mode of existence.
There’s a programme on my computer called Live Messenger. It’s one of a suite of others that are part of the operating system. Recently, whenever I start that programme, a naked woman pops up in front of me.
Some idiot has used the useful technology of the Internet to invade my property and contaminate it with this act of digital mischief. I have tried to remove the programme and rid myself of this pesky humbug – to no avail. I have stopped using Messenger until Roger, my technician, can come over and rid me of this woman.
Meanwhile, whoever has taken over my computer is sending salacious messages and pictures in my name to all my contacts. Thankfully, I don’t have many. This is one of the many occupational hazards that have taken over our lives in this new millennium.
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has already decreed that privacy, as we knew it, is no more, and Andrew Keen writes in Digital Vertigo “All around the world people are revealing their most private thoughts on a transparent network that anyone and everyone can access.”
What will happen?
So what’s to become of folks like me who relish a little privacy; who don’t broadcast what we ate for breakfast this morning or what last week’s blood test found? We want to continue living without being tethered to a smartphone, and the only tablet we need is bezide or digoxin.
You can count me among the few who suggest we step back, take pause and consider for a moment the larger consequences of the current age of hyper-connectedness, social sharing and inability to live without a smartphone and consider the long-term consequences.
Come over soon, Roger, and chase this naked woman off my computer!
• Carl Moore was the first Editor of THE NATION and is a social commentator. Email [email protected]
