In the US, movie stars and recording artists typically make press headlines - most of the time for the wrong reasons. Whether it is about gaining weight, losing weight, getting married or having an affair, it will all make breaking news headlines and dominate most other news mediums for the next coming days/weeks. It is rare that a sports star gets as much media attention. However, Tiger Woods might have changed that with the recent exposure of his private life.

On the other side of the Atlantic, in a country which rarely produces Hollywood sensations or weirdo musicians, the British press survives by discussing athletes, particularly footballers and their relatively unknown wife’s.

The “John Terry scandal” was essentially the “Tiger Woods scandal” scaled down by about 83%. Although it did cause quite the stir in the UK, it never reached the same worldwide affects as Woods’s public embarrassment. I suspect that the British tabloids saw commercial potential in exposing the Chelsea captain, and now former England captain, similar to how the worldwide press presumable made a huge profit from the blonde chasing golfer. It all raises questions of privacy. When is enough, enough?

In a world where the news media have established themselves through four different mediums (mobile, paper, internet and TV), accessible at any time and in any place in the entire world, the smallest details about a celebrities life can be reported. But it really doesn’t stop there. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Google Buzz are now able to report all the small details of everyday people, even the once which are not that interesting.

However, I would like to think that this is not a recent phenomenon. Essentially, this is what has been happening since the dawn of mankind. Privacy is only a modern invention, in medieval times; there was not concept for the word privacy. People lived in a face to face community. It is not until the 19th century where the word privacy actually had a proper meaning, and even then, most towns were too small for anyone to keep a secret.

I like to think of this as a side-effect of globalisation, the redevelopment of human curiosity. All these new clever technologies are simply transforming human behaviour back to the same state as it was prior to the Industrial Revolution. Now people have these amazing tools to serve their thirst for curiosity, and at a much larger scale than ever before.

The most logical answer is that our behaviour is programmed to desire knowledge about the people around us to fulfil a certain need. Enough will then never be enough and people will presumably keep on developing new ways to pry and inspect people’s lives. However, it is comforting to know that modern privacy issues is not a recent development, and therefore not as pervert-oriented as I had imagined. To be honest, I fairly enjoy reading about the mishaps of John Terry, however sad and frightening that might be to the rest of you.

Further Reading
http://techliberation.com/2009/05/27/privacy-as-a-modern-invention/
http://www.theprprofessional.com/privacy-a-modern-invention/