Privacy

There IS an idea of privacy...

What does privacy mean to you? Does it mean something different to someone else? When you pick up a magazine or trawl a gossip website for the most recent juicy news on how your favourite celebrity is publicly embarrassing themselves, does the word still mean the same thing? What about when you read about Clinton and his over-publicised “encounter” with a certain Whitehouse intern, did you feel it was distracting from the more important issues of politics?

With gossip columns more popular than ever, internet websites aplenty dedicated to the naming and shaming of celebrities, and some celebrities even being born out of said gossip blogs. With more and more social networking sites springing up encouraging full disclosure of status and activity, and more and more people in the public eye using these websites, the issue and definition of privacy and a personal life has evolved with the same speed as technology. Privacy has in some ways become more controllable for the common man, but in other ways been completely forgotten. It seems people won’t think twice when scouring the innumerable media outlets for the movements and goings on of their chosen celebrity, and one only has to glance around any random Bebo or Facebook page to find out the details of any persons life.

The general publics fascination with each other’s personal lives doesn’t stop at merely your typical movie star or pop singer, it constantly becomes the focal point in politics too, where it can sometimes overshadow what’s really important. When Clinton was impeached in 1998, the internet was a burgeoning phenomenon that no one could predict the future for. Still it made the scandal more accessible and with the added non-stop coverage of 24hour news channels, Clintons illicit sex-life became a story that the media was ultimately criticised for extensively covering. It has since become the stubborn stain on an otherwise relatively clean blue dress of presidency. But it also taught the successive media men how to harness that power and bring a man with an equally murky private life into power.

Even with your television screen covered with images and reports of Lindsay Lohan being arrested for another “domestic dispute” in the home of her girlfriend or boyfriend (whatever her sexual orientation that particular week), or at every click of your mouse you can find out about Pete Doherty’s latest arrest and subsequent court case for his drug of choice that day, it will be you, the public, that defines how much their own, their privacy will be. Just like it will be us who decides how much information we want to share to the world on our Facebook page, or whether we want to tell everyone what exactly we’re doing at any particular moment, in whatever particular place, over Twitter. The media and technology is merely a gun pointed at the idea of privacy, it is us that must pull the trigger.