It’s a new fact of the digital age: any time you step outside your door, the possibility exists that you may wind up an unwilling figure of shame and ridicule–if not in the “Borat” movie, then at least on YouTube. It’s surprising how celebrities and politicians have been slow to grasp this reality. But the two Bank of America employees at a private function celebrating the company’s merger with MBNA couldn’t have anticipated what happened to them. Their over-the-top rendition of U2’s “One” (with custom lyrics like “Integration has never had us feeling so good”) wound up being mocked by thousands of Internet critics. (Adding injury to insult, lawyers for U2’s record label threatened a lawsuit for copyright infringement.)
There used to be a safer middle ground between an inviolate privacy sanctuary and a no-holds-barred public space, a zone of local accountability and global anonymity, where a gaffe, a humiliation or even a serious lapse in judgment could occur without making waves from San Diego to Sydney. No more–all it takes is one digital rubbernecker who quietly captures the event with a cell-phone camera and posts it to a Web site.
In some ways, this “little-brother surveillance” can have a tonic effect. Maybe the threat of exposure will lead fewer people to expose themselves on the subway. Maybe more people will pick up after their puppies. But I wonder if it might also have a chilling effect. If you were an edgy comedian trying out material in small clubs, maybe you’d keep a safe distance from the edge–and be less funny. And it would be a shame if politicians took the lesson that spontaneity could be deadly–every appearance before a small group would be guarded and bland.
Lately people on the Web have been talking about “radical transparency.” This is a state attained when previously hard-to-find information becomes available and searchable, from public records to MySpace. Avoiding this means cultivating opacity– acting in public as if one moment of petty crime or candor might lead to a global undressing. It would be a shame if we had to live in either extreme. Has the Internet killed translucency?
