European nations, alongside the United States of America and now, increasingly, Turkey, rank as some of the countries whose people are the most spied upon in history. In the UK alone, there is now one camera for every 20 people in the land. About 5 million machines and rising. You cannot move unseen. Professional watchers scrutinize some 1,000 images a minute. Most are logged and lost in archives, but obviously if something is really going down, then the CCTV images are retained, copied and, if necessary, included in evidence in any eventual criminal trial. This is reality TV on a national and increasingly international scale. Andy Warhol once famously quipped that in the modern era, everyone would have at least 15 minutes of fame. This, he deduced, was the inevitable result of the ubiquity of television in the modern era as radio and pictorial art, even photography, were brushed aside in favor of the now moment of television and video, as the explosion in popularity of YouTube has shown with even mobile phone camera material making its out-of-focus mark on the Internet. Warhol's statement was indeed a most prescient prophecy, but one which has far outstripped even his most pessimistic projections.And it is not only CCTV that is surveying and scanning our every move; Internet advertising targets you. Have you not noticed the extraordinary accuracy of the ad inserts that pop up alongside your e-mail sites or tie-in so exclusively with the subject matter that you have typed in Google or other search engines? I have noticed ads that are directed on the basis of certain words I have used in an email and, naturally, in my articles for this newspaper. Someone, somewhere, is most definitely watching you and me. I am not being paranoid, but someone is out to get me… or my money, at any rate. Not paranoid enough for you? What about your mobile phone, eh? This is the gadget that none of us can do without or be without, for that matter. According to an article in The Guardian by Julian Baggini on July 17: “ID cards didn't do it. CCTV cameras didn't do it. Not even the Terrorism Act could rouse the masses to indignant protest about the erosion of their privacy. But recently we learned something could: news that a company called Connectivity was to launch a new mobile phone directory so appalled the nation that the service's [Web site] crashed under the weight of people opting out, and the service was suspended. ‘I'd find it quite intrusive actually,' said one woman stopped on the street by BBC's Working Lunch, whose report ignited the protests. ‘I think whoever gets my mobile phone [number], I should be giving it to them'.”
“What explains this paradoxical combination of opening up in some respects and clamming up in others? An important part of the answer is that personal information is more ruthlessly commercially exploited than it used to be. You were in the phonebook simply because you had a phone. You're on Connectivity's [Web site], however, because someone was paid to hand over your number,” Baggini explained.
In another article which appeared in The Observer on July 19, Ariane Sherine wrote: “Machines are taking over the country. You may not have realized this yet because they're doing it by stealth. They're blinking placidly in the corners of establishments, washing our clothes, vomiting banknotes and spitting out receipts. Do not be fooled. Very soon, they will rule us all.
“When, last week, I asked a bus driver, ‘Please can you tell me when we get to the hospital?' he replied gruffly: ‘The bus will tell you. It speaks.' It did speak, in a bright if weirdly punctuated tone, as though constipated by the effort. I thought back to the friendly, reassuring bus conductors of my childhood, who would whistle while checking tickets and warn, ‘Mind the lights' if you were jumping out while they were red. I doubted if anyone would ever feel nostalgia for the constipated voice. … The corporations are unrepentant. What, they protest, is there not to like about any of this new technology? It's exciting. Advanced. Efficient. Consumers can't get enough of technology -- they walk down the street falling over bins because they're so engrossed in their phones. The fact that most people spend all day staring at screens and would rather talk to a nice woman than a robot when they use public services shouldn't stand in the way of progress.”
She is not wrong. Technology is supposed to help us, to make our increasingly frenetic lives a little less cumbersome and relieve us of some of the more stultifying chores, such as washing clothes or dishes, cleaning carpets, writing newspaper articles, talking to people or being just plain human. Internet-based dating agencies and MSN-style chat rooms, along with the plethora of social Web sites such as Facebook, have effectively replaced real live face-to-face contact, human warmth and empathy and the pleasure of communicating either through words or body language with another sentient being of our own genus. We let our robot talk to your robot.
And another thing. The television should be the most cited defendant in any divorce hearing, being generally the electronic elephant in the living room. Other usual suspects would have to include the personal computer, laptop, Blackberry and -- most perfidious of them all -- the mobile phone. We are now slaves to the machines we have made that were supposed to do our bidding. The average Turk's love affair with gadgets and gizmos proves my point. Anything goes. It is quite extraordinary the lengths to which even the kids who trawl the trash cans will go to be in possession of, or at least have access to, some form of electronic wizardry. Not only is Big Brother watching you but also listening to, recording and analyzing your every word and move. Maybe the Amish people have got it right, eschewing as they do all modern forms of technology, including the internal combustion engine. When was the last time you rode a horse or a bike, wrote or received a letter, walked somewhere or played a board game with someone in your household? When was the last time you purposefully didn't watch television in order to have a discussion with other people with whom you live or turned off your PC or mobile phone in full control of your own actions in order to interact with fellow human beings in the flesh, so to speak? It makes you think, doesn't it?
On Jan. 4, 2008, Nicole Pope wrote in this newspaper: “Data sharing is expanding across the European Union, airlines are expected to provide passengers lists, some governments require cell phone companies to retain records of conversations, while cameras weave an increasingly tight web of surveillance across the globe. Monitoring how governments and private companies use and store the vast amount of data collected while people go about their daily business is getting increasingly complex. In a report published in the last days of 2007, two organizations, Privacy International and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, attempted to do just that by studying constitutional and statutory protections, privacy enforcement, identity cards, visual surveillance, interception of communications and data-sharing in 47 countries. They concluded that, overall, ‘there has been a worsening of privacy protection across the world, reflecting an increase in surveillance and a declining performance of privacy safeguards'.” Regarding Turkey she observed, “Turkey was not included in this comparative study, but as the country starts work on its new constitution, privacy and civil liberties and the regulatory framework needed to implement protections will no doubt be part of the debate.” And not a moment too soon.
Benzer Haberler 
