The new digital paparazzi

Today you don’t have to be a celebrity to have photographers monitoring your every move. We are all now surrounded by new “digital” paparazzi. Every person with a mobile phone camera is potentially able to capture your most embarrassing, amusing and human moments and distribute it via the Internet to the world at large.

This digital paparazzi are likely to be your friends and they may distribute photos of you not out of malice and almost certainly not for financial gain, but simply because the photos are entertaining, unusual or funny.

This digital paparazzi may even distribute photos of you automatically or out of habit without even thinking about you and your feelings. That is simply what this digital paparazzi do after a night out.

In fact, you may even be your own paparazzo.

Teenagers and young adults routinely take photos of themselves and their friends in all sorts of situations, some innocent and some not so innocent, and post them easily to their Facebook or MySpace page on the Internet.

Indeed, recently swimmer Stephanie Rice was her own paparazzo when revealing photos of her were discovered on her Facebook page.

The media gleefully published these photos even though her Facebook page would be far from unique for a teenager, and those photos would be tame compared to some.

However rather than criticise the media or weigh in on the debate surrounding appropriate standards of behaviour for sports starts, I believe this incident demonstrates how technology has resulted in teenagers and young adults having a very different conception of privacy.

Younger generations have grown up in a digital world. More than merely being computer literate, they are completely comfortable with the technology. They have grown up with computers, the Internet and digital photography, They are used to chatting with their friends in chat rooms or by instant messaging. And they consider it normal to have friends that they have only ever met through the Internet.

This is a strange and confronting world for many parents and adults, but it is very much the real world for many teenagers and young adults today.

It is a sign of how comfortable younger generations are within this digital world, that they are prepared to share with others in that world information that would once have been considered private or personal. Digital photographs of themselves and others are nothing more than part of the information they are willing share

Whereas in years gone by you would reminiscence about hysterical, fun and even drunken times by chatting about it at school, uni or work the next day, now you remember those same times by posting your photos online to a Facebook or MySpace page and discussing or commenting upon them on those same pages.