Oh those camera phones. I knew they were trouble the first time I laid eyes on one. A camera is bad enough, but a camera that communicates directly to a network is quite a different matter. There is something indecent in the ease with which you can invade someone else’s privacy.
My rather old-fashioned view is that you should only capture images of other people — be it a snapshot or a film — with their explicit consent. My vanity adds a second condition in this digital age: If you don’t like a picture you should have the right to press delete. But it is a minority view and I myself am being corrupted into sneaking out my phone and taking shots of my nearest and dearest without notice.
But that is nothing. There are those who take it further. Not only do they take pictures when you’d rather they didn’t, but they post them on the Internet or forward them in e-mails. It’s just too easy. Click you’ve taken a picture. Click you’ve forwarded a picture. You barely have time to think about what you are doing.
But as annoying as I find it, I can hardly object to friends and family taking pictures of each other, particularly if these are taken in public places and are primarily taken to record and share a happy memory. It is all rather harmless. No, the problem with this technology is when it is used to do harm. First there was “happy-slapping”: Brainless teenagers finding their kicks by slapping strangers on buses and trains. Bad enough except that the main kick lay in filming the outrage and forwarding it to their friends. This, apparently, is considered funny, not just moderately funny but rip-roaring funny. What does it say about the state of modern society when footage of someone being slapped is considered amusing?
Worrying in itself. More worrying by its sheer prevalence is how children and teenagers use camera phones to bully each other and even their teachers in schools. A recent poll found that more than one in five British schoolchildren had been subjected to some form of cyber-bullying. Even children as young as nine had been exposed to this form of bullying. It can take many forms, from malicious text messages to humiliating video clips posted on Internet sites such as YouTube. It’s insidious. The source remains anonymous and cannot be challenged. The victim cannot protect himself or herself and is often initially unaware of what is being posted about them. Part of the cruelty of cyber-bullying is that there is nowhere to hide.
Cyber-bullying isn’t restricted to pupils, it also affects teachers, so much so that British teachers have campaigned for Internet providers to take measures to block or remove footage taken by pupils of their teachers from their sites. British teachers have also won the right to confiscate phones if they think these are being used inappropriately.
A nasty development is the combination of physical bullying with cyber-bullying. Police are investigating reports that in one of Britain’s leading boarding schools pupils were tied up to a chair by other pupils and forced to watch horrific images downloaded from the Internet — images of torture, sexual depravity and bestiality. Images which for one thing should not have crossed the firewall of the school’s computers, but that is part of the problem facing parents and educators. It is almost impossible to control what teenagers will view on the Internet. They are simply more Internet-savvy than their elders and will invariably find ways to circumvent the system.
Bullying has existed since time immemorial. It is nasty and ugly, it destroys lives and damages childhoods, but what strikes me about cyber-bullying is the extent to which society has become hooked to recording and publishing its every deed. From blogs which give blow-by— blow accounts of the most intimate details of people’s lives, to similarly intimate video clips posted on Internet sites such as YouTube, it is a logical straight line to finding that it is not enough to humiliate someone, that humiliation has to be witnessed and disseminated, it has to be filmed and posted else it just doesn’t count. Don’t just look at schoolchildren; look right there at us adults. Whether it was the abusive guards at Abu Ghraib or the barbarian beheaders of Al-Qaeda, the cameras were rolling and the Internet relayed the images across the cyber-sphere. So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that children feel the need to record their cruelty.
I’m not sure what can be done about this but I am convinced that we are all too complacent. How many of us have viewed material taken illicitly? Even if this material was not bloody or violent, we have taken part in the violation of someone’s privacy. A few years ago there was footage of a certain Egyptian actress taken behind her back by a man who had seduced her. He posted it on the web, proudly. He pasted his name and phone number in big letters presumably so that other men could congratulate him on his great achievement. This footage was forwarded from e-mail to e-mail. I know I received a copy, as did many people I know. There was nothing the actress could do to stop these images traveling from computer to computer, but we could have pressed delete. Those who forwarded the e-mail were just as guilty as the man who filmed her in the first place. And so it is with cyber-bullying, teenagers must understand that viewing images of others being humiliated, be they a teacher they despise or the least popular girl in class, degrades the viewer more than the victim. Privacy and respect may sound like old-fashioned values, but they have never been so important.
