Privacy ended when...

As you probably heard, a paparazzo was able to take pictures of Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, while she was sunbathing, topless, on private property in France.  Obviously, a lot people are very disgusted at the violation of the princess's privacy, especially in the country where the Duke of Cambridge's mother, Princess Diana, was killed in an accident caused in part by the paparazzi.  I found this particular story quite interesting, peppered as it is with posts from the Twittersphere condemning the magazine.  There is also a link to a column by the Telegraph's William Foxton, who points out that with the technology now available, no one is safe, and certainly not the royals. Privacy, he writes, will be "a thing of the past."  The paparazzi will no longer need the telephoto lenses; the iPhones (and their Samsung clones?) will be sent in on radio-controlled flying drones. 

It's interesting that he mentions the telephone in this context.  But first, a step back. 

Privacy is a concept that has evolved over time.   Tribal man, to use McLuhan's terminology, was a public one.  Privacy only emerges in the age of domesticating animals and husbandry, and the building of permanent structures.   "Old media" like print establish another level of privacy, as the solitary author writes for an audience he/she may never meet, and a solitary reader will read works from authors long-dead.  But electric media, as McLuhan points out, marks a kind of "return" of tribal man, a new kind of village.   And I would argue that this revolution really began with the telephone.   Once the telephone is installed into the domestic space, anyone can penetrate the walls of our home at any time.  Where messages by mail or even telegraph required time, a sense of space, and a human messenger (the mail carrier), the phone was instantaneous and traversed space and time.   Welcome or not, the ringing telephone alarms us, sends out a jolt, shocks us.  Caller ID may help you ignore calls you don't want, but the shock is there nonetheless.   In this sense, as one media veteran told me once, privacy ended when Don Ameche invented the telephone.   If you want real privacy, he said, turn off your phone, disconnect your internet connections, and build a moat (or live in Jersey, where the tolls to cross the Hudson function pretty much the same as a moat).  

With the taking of naked royals with our mobiles, we once again find the telephone returning to its place as the "original violator" of privacy.  Of course, the royals will take the French magazine to court and might even win.  It's easy enough to see that the Duchess of Cambridge should have an expectation of privacy in that setting, and a judge may agree.   (Said judge will be very sensitive, I imagine, because of what happened to Princess Diana in 1997.)  But such scenarios are the social consequences of the electric media, where all our central nervous systems can touch one another -- and make no mistake, celebrity is a very large central nervous system on display constantly.