The fame generation needs to learn the value of privacy

With Britain home to four million blogs, the inner monologue is in peril. But when everything is made public, something is lost

Marina Hyde
Saturday November 10, 2007
The Guardian

" ... There's something in that repeated "who I am" that seems to suggest the almost total collapse of the private into the public. Gradually, older generations are having to adjust to the notion that not only do younger people not really care about privacy; they often don't even comprehend the idea of it. Watch the audition rounds of any television talent show, and it seems as if an entire generation now believes fame to be a basic human right. Maybe one of the other rights had to give. Maybe it was privacy. At this rate, they'll be employing acting coaches to make their CCTV outings stand out from the crowd.

But the view that this is a cultural shift with which we must all make our peace is wrong. Naive and cavalier is a dangerous combination, and a disdain for their own privacy will leave young people immensely exposed.

Consider the case of the 23-year-old Muslim woman who was found guilty this week under new anti-terror laws. Samina Malik worked for WH Smith at Heathrow, but was given to writing poetry about beheading non-believers and martyrdom and suchlike. Not long after she had begun visiting chatrooms, calling herself the "lyrical terrorist" - she thought the name "cool" - the knock at the door came. Examination of her computer revealed she had downloaded, inter alia, something called "How to win in hand-to-hand combat". She lives in Southall, awaits sentencing.

When we live in a society where reactionary bedroom poets are found guilty under terrorism laws, it makes you wonder whether their rather more seasoned and significantly more brilliant predecessors such as Swift wouldn't, in a similar climate, have realised the folly of bunging their every move on Facebook, and made alternative arrangements.

The world may be shifting, but we must attempt to encourage in young people an understanding of the value of privacy, and a sense of the very real dangers that might attend them should they discard it. Continue to create a lively persona, by all means, but keep at least some of that inner monologue back from public consumption. After all, one can commune surprisingly rewardingly with oneself alone. As Gwendolen, Cecily's imagined love rival in The Importance of Being Earnest, so memorably declares: "I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train." ... "

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