Face it, the world is watching you Section:Review

By:JONATHAN HOLBURT

Publication:The Straits Times 05/09/2009

THE future just isn't what it used to be. In George Orwell's novel 1984, we thought we saw an accurate depiction: An omniscient dictator whose eyes were on everyone. At a time of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Franco, it resonated. But now, instead of "Big Brother", we have lots of little brothers and sisters, mums and dads in fact, everyone looking at all of us all the time.

Take Jade Goody. The British TV star of reality show Big Brother died of cervical cancer earlier this year. She broadcast her dying days for everyone to see, making that most private and tragic of acts a public spectacle. "I've lived my whole life in front of the cameras," she said. "And maybe I'll die in front of them."

But this new transparent world isn't just for prurient types. China, for example, realises you can no longer control information by just controlling the press. The press, nowadays, is the people. Anyone with a camera phone is a journalist.

Protesters at riots in Shishou city in Hubei province took videos on their camera phones and put them online. Dr Yu Jianrong from the Chinese Academy of Social Science said of the June event that "it was like a live telecast". This fact is not lost on media outlets like CNN, which often solicit images from people on the spot.

The Chinese government's response to all this has been multifaceted: a failed attempt to put web-filtering "Green Dam" software on all PCs, jamming mobile phone signals during moments of unrest and, on occasion, even disrupting the Internet.

But with some 750 million mobile phone users and now 322 million online users, it won't work. In the never-ending battle between the sword and the shield the sword being information, the shield being control of it the sword always wins.

The future wasn't always supposed to be this way. For example, in the science fiction film series The Matrix, what humans perceive as reality was actually a simulated world, created by machines to pacify and suppress human beings. It was an opaque universe where nothing was as it appeared to be. And based on what is happening today, that really was fiction.

Because now, more than ever, everything is visible to everyone. From Bloomberg to Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and other social networking sites that tell you more about a person than you care to know, to Google Maps and geo-location devices that can pinpoint where you are at any time, you can't escape being visible to all at all times. What's driving this change? Technology, plus politics, plus the universal desire of human beings to know more about more things.

When Jemaah Islamiah terrorist Mas Selamat Kastari escaped from custody in Singapore, his face was sent to 5.5 million cellphones as part of the manhunt to find him. The most wanted poster is now no longer stapled to a wall it's in your pocket.

New companies such as ReputationHAWK and ReputationDefender will help protect or blunt Internet attacks against ordinary people, especially as everyone who looks for a job nowadays is the subject of a Google search. Apparently, these companies do it by creating positive data about you, which crowd out the negative.

In his 1969 book, The Human Zoo, zoologist Desmond Morris articulated a vision of humanity suffering from unnatural relationships in civilised environments. What would he have written about the world today? Are we really in a new age of totalitarianism let's call it multitarianism with 1984's Big Brother morphing virus-like into curious stares from everyone?

There's a saying, "people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones". In this transparent age, the entire world is a glass house. And certainly that moderates behaviour from countries to companies. Pariah-hood is more easily achieved today.

In 1928, public relations guru Edward Bernays, wrote: "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society." In the near past, countries and companies controlled how their reputations and brands were received and perceived through carefully crafted communication. It was one-way communication: Companies spoke; consumers listened. Countries spoke; citizens obeyed.

Now, it's two-way communication, even a dialogue, with people responding via the town halls and public squares of today: social networking and blog sites.

Which comes back to the way to thrive in this new world. Since it really is the age of transparency, everyone, including officials and managers, will have to truly understand the new rules: Whatever you do will potentially be watched and analysed by everyone.

The big world has become a small village again, where we are all watching our neighbours. As Allen Funk said on his long-running show: "Smile, you're on Candid Camera."

Now we all are. Literally, all of us.