If you were to stop someone you know and ask them to give you a list of all their friends — together with their friends’ friends, complete with their special interests — you would be dismissed as strange, if not bizarre. Yet that is what is happening voluntarily with the seemingly unstoppable expansion of social websites such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook.
For years we have been worried stiff about a state-backed Big Brother using new technology to extract personal information about us, whether from the web or closed-circuit television cameras. But now it has all changed.
Surveillance is so pervasive that it won’t be long before someone publishes a consumer’s guide to CCTV cameras; and we are so unworried about privacy that we are voluntarily shovelling information about ourselves into the public domain that can be used by governments or potential employers, not to mention predators.
If you accept someone as a friend on Facebook, you immediately have access to all their friends’ photographs and details, together with similar information about their friends’ friends and so on.
Members have a personal wall on which anyone can write comments for everyone in their network to read and comment on. They can also take advantage of a box where they can leave comments about what they are doing at that moment, however trivial — such as, “I’m missing Sevenoaks all of a sudden”, or “I am still trying to start work”.
The curious thing is that it is easy to build up your own image of the kind of person unveiling themselves, partly because there is an endearing spontaneity about them.
Facebook has barriers against abuse, to the extent that email addresses and photos are posted so fakes ought to be easy to unmask. Nevertheless, delving into someone’s past life on Facebook or the other sites may prove much more useful in future to those conducting job interviews than a bland CV and 30 minutes of questions in an artificial environment.
New sites are coming out, such as Imagini.net, which are successfully building accurate profiles of people based on their reaction to photographs shown to them, but that is nothing to what can be gained from trawling a social website — unless, of course, Facebookers or Beboers, knowing it could be important in future, start building a flattering profile.
This striptease of the vanities is happening all over the world and so quickly that there hasn’t been time for a PhD thesis to tell us what it is all about. Maybe the best way to understand it is that the digital revolution is recreating on a global scale the bonded communities of old. As the perennially relevant Marshall McLuhan observed: “Privacy, like individualism, is unknown in tribal societies.”
Just as young people head like hunter-gatherers into city centres to link up with each other by cellphone, so the new global villagers are using technology to break down traditions of secrecy in favour of mutually shared knowledge, no matter how personal.
As McLuhan also noted more than 40 years ago: “When we have achieved a worldwide fragmentation, it is not unnatural to think about a worldwide integration. Such a universality of conscious being was dreamt of by Dante, who believed that men would remain mere broken fragments until they should be reunited in an inclusive consciousness.”
It is easy to write a disaster scenario for a world in which everyone is linked and in which you can communicate instantaneously with everyone in your group, however extensive, since the accelerating speed of circulation of news and comments could produce the worst excesses of madness of crowds.
But it could also produce a global counterbalance to the excesses of politicians and corporations and an electronic version of the Indian idea of darshan, which McLuhan described as “the mystical experience of being in very large gatherings”. The global village may at last be at hand. — Guardian Unlimited Â