Why privacy goes out the window...
TO DISCUSS intimate health issues with a close friend isn’t a thing that’s easy to do.
But to reveal such information to the whole top deck of a busy bus takes indiscretion to another level altogether.
Yet there she was, mobile pressed to her ear, describing in loud voice and great detail the symptoms of a tummy bug that had beset her.
“Yeah, I was really sick.” Dramatic pause. “REALLY sick.”
There was another pause – not this time for emphasis nor to raise suspense levels, but because she was listening to the contribution of the unfortunate soul at the other end of the line.
“Yeah,” she interjected. “Horrible. REALLY horrible.”
We who sat close to her could only speculate reluctantly and darkly about what might have been so horrible.
Perhaps the impact of what she’d managed to eat that day – a slice of pizza and a packet of crisps.
But the tone of the conversation lightened as she revealed she was feeling better and would be stopping off at the shops on the way home before retiring early to bed.
I wonder who else on the bus was tempted to break into an ironic round of applause.
Did this woman imagine that her fellow passengers were deaf to her words or did she simply not care that they were party to a conversation concerning the rumblings, grumblings and explosions of her digestive system?
Trouble is, mobile phones lull us into a false sense of security.
Mobile phones blur the line between the private and the public – allowing us to chat to good friends whilst forgetting other people are around us.
It’s the same with websites where folk post information and photographs that they think will be seen by only their friends, but are, in fact, accessible to all and sundry.
You’d have thought us ordinary folk would have learned to be a little bit more cautious from the experience of celebrities such as Paris Hilton and Leslie Grantham, whose shenanigans famously found their way on to the worldwide web.
But no – we blabber and we blog, we text and we twitter as though we are sitting in a room with a couple of trusted pals having a good old gossip that will go no further.
Accept it: privacy’s harder to enjoy in the electronic age.
