A word in private

 *** Disclaimer ***

There’s a group on Facebook for residents of my local area to air their views. Obviously I don’t want to name names here without permission, and I won’t be quoting anybody directly for that reason. Having said that, all these comments appear on a public Facebook group which holds no stringent requirements for membership; it’s not exactly difficult to find out where I live either (not many local council seats will have just had a by-election due to a recent death of the sitting Councillor), and so you could probably locate these discussions for yourself with minimal effort.

All this can be summed up thus: privacy sure is confusing these days. So, where does local politics fit in?

Oh yeah, sorry: *** End disclaimer ***

Privacy is one of this group’s prevailing themes - many of the posts are about recent robberies in the area, which are helpfully advisory/paranoia-inducingly ominous depending on one’s views. The local MP is active on the group, thus allowing complainers a direct hook-up with the powerbrokers (or at least their representatives).

However, there seems to be considerably less enthusiasm when this line of communication runs the other way. MP’s responses to the issues raised are regularly given a stock, dissatisfied brush-off - “pah, you’re all talk - nothing ever gets done”, “why aren’t you out there solving all my life’s problems RIGHT NOW?”, and so forth. The nadir of this was the reaction of some folk to election campaigning. Because yes, some party machines (Labour seemingly the main culprit) had the gall to not just knock on the doors of their potential constituents for a chat, but to leave them answerphone messages too.

The resulting rage didn’t arise solely out of political apathy, although that undoubtedly plays a part. Instead it was framed as a privacy issue. The gist was that people's houses, and phones, etc, are their own private kingdoms whose walls politicians shouldn’t be allowed to breach (especially where telephone numbers have been obtained without permission, which is a valid point but an altogether different debate), even if the purpose of the call is a genuinely honest one - there’s an election coming, check out our manifesto, then decide whether you want to vote for us, that sort of thing.

Now, this sounds fairly innocuous to me. Not so for the complainers. “We’ll decide for ourselves whether we want to take part in the election”, they cry. “Your manifesto is available online/in the library, so stop pushing your leaflets through our doors already!” Whatever interaction they desire is very much on their terms.

The apparent contradiction between valuing one’s privacy whilst simultaneously maintaining an active presence on social networking sites is easily resolved – most of us regard such online activities as shared between selected friends, acquaintances and family members rather than being truly “public”. (Obviously anonymous forms of internetting, such as below-the-line article comments, forums and the newly-notorious Ask.fm - which sounds like a total clusterfuck, by the way – are a different kettle of fish.)

This bubble-living easily extends into the offline world too. It’s particularly noticable in a city like London, many of whose inhabitants have no geographical ties to the particular area they end up living in – their (ok, our) communities instead extend to their various friends, workmates and favourite bars/restaurants/etc scattered around the city. Meanwhile, fear of crime and other forms of paranoia causes us to hunker down whenever we are at home, in an attempt to prevent our physical neighbours encroaching onto our territory.

This desire for privacy on our own terms ties in with recent outrages at perceived losses of civil liberties, from blatant abuses of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act by local councils to spy on parents who may or may not be lying about their living arrangements in order to get little Leo or Lily into an acceptable school all the way up to the US basically having bagsied the whole internet for snooping purposes.

Such revelations are of course unpleasant, but they don’t quite paint the whole picture. While the general public keeps an ever-tighter grip on its rights of confidentiality, it also has a voracious appetite for the truth. The ease with which we can find out stuff courtesy of the internet means that we’re no longer satisfied with catching up on the news at the end of a day in a neatly-wrapped bulletin. We want to know everything from the moment it breaks, down to the minutest detail. We don’t just watch films and TV shows while they’re on anymore, we consume them constantly, demand wall-to-wall coverage of their stars’ lives and expect regular lines of communication with the cast, writers, etc (in many cases purely so we can go apeshit when the wrong fictional thing happens, see further the Lost finale farrago). Meanwhile, every single aspect of the footballing world is now analysed to within an inch of its life.

It seems we’ve reached a paradoxical crossroads – in many ways we have more freedom than we know what to do with, but we don’t want others to exercise theirs if it affects our own.

I’ve been reading Jared Diamond’s The World Before Yesterday (all of his work is well worth checking out, by the way), in which he discusses the lifestyles of traditional societies. Tribes and bands of hunter-gatherers almost literally lived on top of each other, sleeping in the same rooms, pooling together all their resources, looking after each other’s kids, etc. But equally they were often in conflict with neighbouring tribes, and certainly didn’t have the same freedom that we have to travel openly outside of their own territories. I’m not sure exactly what that teaches us, except maybe that things haven’t changed all that much over the centuries. Perhaps we just need to loosen up a little…