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Marshall McLuhan in 1966
‘The world is now like a continually sounding tribal drum, where everybody gets the message all the time,’ said Marshall McLuhan in 1964. But in today’s global village, the villagers answer back. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis
‘The world is now like a continually sounding tribal drum, where everybody gets the message all the time,’ said Marshall McLuhan in 1964. But in today’s global village, the villagers answer back. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

Privacy is starting to seem like a very 20th-century anomaly

This article is more than 8 years old
David Shariatmadari

For most of human history, people lived with little or no expectation of a private life. So the new normal, where everyone knows your business, is perhaps not so new – but the golden age of privacy afforded us some important things

Medieval villagers couldn’t afford to be too proud. In Montaillou, home to some 200 souls, people would often sleep several to a bed. That meant that they were constantly picking up lice. No matter: in 14th-century France, delousing was a just another opportunity to socialise. A woman called Raymonde Guilhou, the historian Emmanuel Le Roy LaDurie tells us, publicly deloused her lover, who also happened to be a priest. She performed the same task for his mother, “in full view of everybody in the doorway of the ostal [house], retailing the latest gossip as she did so”.

It’s probably fair to say that Guilhou didn’t have many secrets. The village was her entire world, and that world in turn knew everything about her: family ties, sexual liaisons, personal hygiene. Anything she said might be overheard, or passed on. Anything she wrote – well, she couldn’t write. There was no secret diary of Raymonde Guilhou. Her whole life was shared, and there was nowhere to hide.

This world without privacy still seems alien to us. I say still, because there are growing parallels between the medieval village and its modern, global counterpart. This week, the government published a draft bill to enable it to track citizens’ internet use. The novelist Robert Harris wondered how these kind of powers would have struck us just 40 years ago: “Theresa May’s proposal quite staggering. Imagine if in the 70s, to fight the IRA, MI5 had demanded to know every shop visited, book read, inquiry made.” But state surveillance is only the half of it. With varying levels of enthusiasm and consent, we regularly submit ourselves to the surveillance of our peers. We broadcast our location, our relationships, what we eat and drink. We invite strangers to pore over every inch of our existence, so that they might as well be delousing us.

And the end result may be an experience not too far removed from Guilhou’s. Go on a date and the whole village (read: all your friends, their friends and whoever else is interested) knows. Give money to charity and the whole village knows. Fly into a rage while out shopping and the whole village knows. Read some heretical text and you might just receive a visit from the sheriff.

This is not quite the “global village” of Marshall McLuhan’s imagination: “These new media of ours,” he said in 1964, “have made our world into a single unit. The world is now like a continually sounding tribal drum, where everybody gets the message all the time. A princess gets married in England, we all hear about it … an earthquake in North Africa, a Hollywood star gets drunk, away go the drums again.” Then, the communication was mostly one way. In 2015, the villagers answer back. The result is arguably a more censorious environment, one in which your movements and behaviour are more strictly policed, officially and unofficially. And it replaces a period of “privacy” that is beginning to look like a bit of an anomaly.

It’s a long journey from delousing on the doorstep to the idea of a right to a private life, which crystallised in the second half of the 19th century. In between, the number of people who could afford a bedchamber or a house of their own had slowly increased. The growth of cities meant grand residences and privacy for some; cheek-by-jowl living for others. The postal system afforded a secret means of communication for those who could read and write (an early case of interception involved officials opening letters addressed to Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini in 1844, to public outcry). Laws against blackmail and defamation were intended to protect elites, who were nevertheless tightly bound by conventional morality.

If privacy had a golden age, it was after these moral strictures had loosened, but before the age of mass chronicling and surveillance: the time when cities in the west offered the opportunity to start again, to disappear and re-emerge transformed, stretching perhaps from the 1960s to the end of the century. In Stephen Sondheim’s 1970 musical Company, there is a hymn to New York called Another Hundred People, a reference to the constant churn of new arrivals. It captures the thrill of anonymity, the promise of a place where people who don’t fit in elsewhere can live without the disapproval of small-minded neighbours. Instead, they can meet and build their own villages from scratch: “It’s a city of strangers, some come to work, some to play … the ones who stay can find each other in the crowded streets and the guarded parks.”

Now we live with a different kind of anonymity. If you know someone’s real name, it doesn’t take much to find out where they live, who they like to sleep with and what their sister’s name is. On the other hand, legions of internet users adopt false identities. The freedom this affords them is sometimes the wonderful freedom of the city, to leave old things behind and connect with other like-minded souls. But it’s often the freedom to intimidate or threaten, with no cost to the real self.

The rise and fall of privacy mirrors closely the rise and fall of mass media. As Tom Standage explains in his fascinating book Writing on the Wall, for most of history information was distributed socially – it was created by “users”, shared horizontally and often contained personal observations or locally relevant facts. Pamphlets, broadsides and circulars were the order of the day. The period during which we sat in front of a newspaper, radio or TV, passively consuming what a few proprietors and editors had served up for us was a blip, an aberration. But to those born in the 20th century, it seems like the natural way of things – just like the notion of a private life. We’ve clearly got some adjusting to do.

The new normal, where everyone knows your business, could be a good example of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. And it’s worth pointing out that Raymonde Guilhou wasn’t stopped from doing as she pleased by the beady eyes of her fellow villagers. Maybe we’ll become inured to the gaze of others, and end up letting it all hang out, with no regrets. But as we tramp back to the village, it’s worth mourning that golden age of privacy, and the city that allowed people to reinvent themselves like the characters in Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side. Life may never be as mysterious again.

More on this story

More on this story

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  • George Osborne's spending review to raise number of UK spies

  • Andy Burnham calls for more judicial safeguards in UK surveillance bill

  • May to assist case on anti-terror laws after police accessed phone records

  • David Davis: British 'intellectually lazy' about defending liberty

  • This snooper’s charter makes George Orwell look lacking in vision

  • Theresa May’s threat to the privacy of reading

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