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Friday 4 March 2016

Remember when....we had privacy

Remember before the internet - when we had 'privacy'? When we had - for want of a better word - 'boundaries'?  Before emoticons and DMs and photographing your own bottom and transmitting it round the entire planet?  Remember when you actually had to make an effort, if you wanted to spy on somebody?  You couldn't just do it from under your duvet using only your thumbs while working your way through a tube of Pringles.
Now we're all being spied on - all of the time.  And nobody cares.  Nobody cares!  It seems normal! NORMAL!
It's not normal.  Nothing about life in 2016 is normal.  The weather's not normal.   Food isn't normal. And being in contact with people ALL the time isn't normal.  It's freakish and unhealthy and creepy. Where's the psychological space?  We're all under constant surveillance, all of the time, whether it's the obvious things like having your shopping 'choices' monitored and scrutinised so they can sell you more, and your so-called friends and family poking their noses in via the internet and thinking they know all about you, or darker things like the 'security services' (who are they?) and stalkers that you'll never ever know about because they live in their bedroom in Nebraska and you live with your son's ex-girlfriend in a semi in the Wirral and earn your living videoing your own bottom and your husband's dead in the freezer with a tattoo of I heart David Attenborough on his left artificial pec, and - and it certainly isn't 'normal'.
Everything's done 'online'. Banking.  Shopping.  Listening to music.  Watching telly.  Making stuff up. Like what I'm doing now.
It's not normal, I tell you.  Not NORMAL!  Nothing is, nothing is.  I used to think I wasn't normal till we got to this appalling stage and now I think I'm the most normal person alive.
Nothing's done 'outside' any more. By 'outside' I mean outwith the parameters of the internet. Because nothing CAN be done outside any more.  Or so it seems.
Remember when you could close your front door and take the phone off the hook and that was IT? Peace and bloody quiet.  If someone wanted to spy on you they had to stand outside your house and WAIT.  Writing stuff down in a real notebook with a real pencil and taking photographs with a real camera containing a 'spool' or 'roll of film' which they then had to get developed in a 'dark room'.
Remember that film, One Hour Photo, with Robin Williams, where he spied on that family via their photographs?  It seemed freakishly hi-tech back then and now it's like the dark ages.
And oh yeah - remember when, if you got fed up, you could get on a random bus to Wick or Land's End or Milton Keynes and VANISH - and nobody would know.  You weren't traceable via CCTV and your mobile phone, and you wouldn't have your coupon blasted round 'social media' until you were 'found', whether you liked it or not.
  

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