Privacy Expectations in the Global Village.

Privacy Expectations in the Global Village.

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If you need to look over your shoulder before you do something, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it.

 

 

Global village is a term most closely associated with Marshall McLuhan, brought closer to the mainstream  in his books The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) and Understanding Media (1964). McLuhan describes how the globe has been contracted into a village by electric technology and the instantaneous movement of information from every quarter to every point at the same time.

 

Looking back to the turn of the twentieth century, most of the world’s population lived in definably smaller communities than we do now. Essentially we lived in local villages.  Our media has always been a reflection of our situation, back in the day and even to this day, village media has reported on the events that are available to them…that is their function. In a local village this leads to headlines such as, “Well, Well, Look Who Got Himself a Toro” and, “High School Valedictorian Ready to Leave”. If you have ever lived in a smaller community you are already aware of what I am talking about…you really can’t keep a secret from your community. Even if the local paper didn’t report it, your neighbors would gossip about it. It didn’t matter if they got the info first hand by observation of a public space, second hand by listening in on an old “party-line” telephone or simply by repeating other gossip.

 

It has taken almost fifty years but we seem to have finally grown out of the local into the global village. We have decided to share with the world, be it of our own accord on Facebook, Twitter or MySpace or by exhibition of public spaces on Google Streetview, our activities.

 

If I share my activities or perform them in public, do I really have an expectation of privacy?

 

I think not.

 

Maybe I need to colour my decisions with the thought that if I need to look over my shoulder before I do something, maybe I shouldn’t be doing it at all.