Welcome to the Age of Transparency
Geoge Orwell’s dystopian novel ‘1984’ chronicled the futuristic life of Winston Smith, a regular white-collar employee navigating the heavily monitored society of Oceania. It has become increasingly clear that present-day activity has also become a heavily tracked and monitored environment that differs tremendously from the way of life I grew up in during the ’70s and ’80s. The existence of cell phones (videos, camera, texting, messaging, cookie tracking and ‘cloud storage’), closed circuit television cameras (CCTV) and social media commentary — have created an environment where the regular person aka Winston Smiths, cannot ‘get away’ with anything. Honest, transparent behaviour has become the best practice of today’s modern existence.
I am not creating this content to shriek alarm bells or warn of some nightmarish social situation…in fact, I am looking at the silver lining of our present situation. Let me explain. In the days of public phone booths, wall-based home phones with extra-long cords, Vic20 cassette-loaded software and imagination-fueled childhood play time (hide & seek, tag, red rover, etc) — we were not ‘online’ through devices that inherently recorded or tracked activity. Fast-forward to the 2000s and we have a much more electronic, personalized social life that affords us lots of time-saving advantages. I have always maintained that cell ‘phones’ are used the least for actual talking. Apps, social sites and audio/visual streaming choices have afforded us the ability to entertain ourselves how we want., whenever we want. Yet there is a social price to pay for these amenities…our every keystroke is being recorded and thus our behaviour can be investigated and analyzed like never before in history.
So I am going to make a bold suggestion. Behave yourself. Assume that ALL of your activities and conversations are being monitored and may come back to you for an explanation. In short, can you justify what you watch, say and type if it comes back to you? I know this may seem limiting and even a violation of privacy — yet there are countless stories of people who believed that what they were engaged in, would never come back to them — and it did. The definition of integrity is ‘adherence to moral and ethical principles’” aka behaving positively when no one is looking. As I stated earlier in this blog, this is just the flip side of the digital, AI-infused society we are living in. The trade-off we have to make as we utilize electronic devices that are built to make our lives easier.?
I have come to the personal conclusion that transparent, justifiable, accountable behaviour is the most stress-free path for me to follow in modern times. This way of thinking may be the human evolution that we are not paying attention to as we enjoy this digital industrial time period.?Who knows...