Though the explosion of social media and messaging apps has made our lives very public, this is not the first time that society has had to ...
Though the explosion of social media and messaging apps has made our lives very public, this is not the first time that society has had to grapple with the issue of privacy. As the writer Gabriel García Márquez famously said. “All human beings have three lives: public, private and secret.”
The boundaries between these spheres and our understanding of these lines vary with time, the nature of the society to which we belong and, often, the class of society from which we are drawn. Ironically, even though we often claim to value our privacy, our actions make it clear that we don’t.
That is obvious from our continuous sharing of personal information on social media interactions, our use of apps that disclose our every footstep to the world, and our searches through the search engines that articulate our desires and our fears.
Does the concept of privacy need to be redefined in the era of the internet and social media?
Recalling Orwell
Whenever the question of privacy is discussed, British writer George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four inevitably makes an appearance. Describing the control mechanisms of an authoritarian government, it is probably the definitive novel of the 20th century.
In the novel, Orwell coined terms such as “Big Brother”, “doublethink” and “newspeak”...
