Martin says: “I’ve just found out that my best friend Carlos has separated from his wife, that Diego has a head ache and is addicted to Ibuprofen, that Claudia – the friend of a friend that I have never ever seen – her clothes don’t fit her anymore and my girlfriend has just broken-up with me. She found out yesterday on Facebook that I hadn’t gone to the movies with my friends, saw the photos of that girl…and well it’s all over.”
A world in which private life does not exist appears possible. A life in which not only our tastes and habits, but everything that we do on a daily basis, is converted into news for the benefit of the greater public knowledge.
Living deprived of our privacy, as if we were Hollywood stars may be feasible in the future thanks to the attraction for self exhibition that Internet has inspired in part of our society.
In the early days of the Web the presence of an ordinary person went unnoticed among the millions of websites. We could find out who Madonna was going out with or the latest drinking binge of Prince William & Harry, but nothing about Pepe, the neighbor next door. There were no great differences with the offering from the traditional media, the combination of TV-radio-press that dominated the major part of the 20th Century. Much more information, faster and updated several times a day, but the same type of news.
The jump to 2.0 and the creation of user generated content that today mobilizes the major share of digital traffic has broken with all the previously conceived scenarios. Nowadays we not only live the private lives of the famous. Today anyone can post his photos on Facebook, or tell us what he is doing minute by minute on Twitter, or upload the video of a night out with friends on You Tube. Everyone is converting themselves in the Paparazzi of their own life and as a consequence, the lives of all those around them.
Even if you should decide to avoid this unwanted publicity and carry on with life in happy anonymity there is still a possibility that Internet threatens to frustrate you.
“You are on Facebook aren’t you?” is now a common question among surfers. “I’ve never registered but my friends upload videos in which I appear; my sister posted images of when we were kids and I am running around naked, and my wife is a friend of my mates so she knows everything that we do every time we get together…so I’m not, but I am.”, the other might easily respond.
New functions offered by some sites complicate this panorama even further. The option of tagging the faces in a photo so that when you pass over it with a mouse so you can identify the person is one of the novelties. Some sites have started to test a system that will allow automatic face recognition. As a result, in time Internet will become plagued by images and videos of each and every one of us.
Googling candidates in a job search is already a common practice among many human resource teams. What are they searching for? More information, personal data that has not already been detailed on a CV but that the detective Web 2.0 places at their disposal.
For the moment there do not appear to be any restrictions or tools that allow us to detain our steady march towards stardom, so the end of our days of anonymity appear to be close.
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