Several times a month, my mother, or sometimes my father, butt dial me and accidentally left a voicemail several minutes long. I always listen to the whole thing, even though I never heard anything interesting. Why do I keep doing this? And is it possible to eavesdrop on people’s lives without their knowledge?
—Scuttle Butt
Dear Scuttle Butt,
Speed dial voicemail is the most aesthetically underrated artifact of our time. Many years from now, when cell phones are classified as a museum of technological obsolescence, we will finally recognize the eerie beauty of these ghostly dispatches, recorded audios without no human intention, life’s moments that have sometimes risen to the level of art. The rustling, vague muffled sound of a pocket or purse. Familiar voices seemed to be rising from the depths of the ocean. Everyone listens — how could you not? There is always the possibility of an emergency. Someone has fallen and is lying, helpless, unable to speak. Thieves have broken into your home and your loved one is nestled in a scared cupboard whispering for help. Voicemail, after all, is message, and you wait in vain despair long after it becomes clear that there is nothing, that only the crunch of footsteps on the gravel, the sound of electric razors, the unmistakable sound of your mother’s laughter you, come to you for no reason as you sit at your desk on the other side of the country, having lunch in the bright light of your Twitter feed.
That’s not to say there aren’t some eye-catching games with different types of gardens. Eavesdropping on some revealing information – maybe even about yourself – is always a possibility that cannot be ignored. Pocket dial-up voicemail belongs to a larger technologically permeable category that, as far as I know, has no name. Let’s call it “accidental surveillance”. Long before cell phones, car radios occasionally picked up on truckers talking over CB. Before that, there was the party line, its line running through several households, carrying gossip and conspiracy throughout the neighborhood. In the story of John Cheever”Giant radio station“Instead of Mozart and news summaries, they turn the dials to listen to marriage stories, bedtime stories, the feverish end of a cocktail party. The wife became obsessed when listening to the neighbors, many of her husband’s derision. “It was indecent,” he said. “It’s like looking out the window.”
Perhaps these examples make you feel strange. After all, what attraction can survive in an age where people happily throw the curtains? The windows we look in seem endless, opening to celebrity bedrooms, private yacht cabins, British royal breakfasts — images that appear in the feed Along with what’s close to the common man: a post-chemo haircut modeled on your ex-boss, a positive pregnancy test proudly flaunted by your high school nemesis. I suspect, Scuttle Butt, that there is some measure of guilt – or fear of dishonesty – implicit in your question. It’s impossible but it seems greedy to have an extra peek into someone else’s life when you can, with a few clicks, covertly with so much intimacy.
Perhaps there is a paradox going on. It has become something of a cliché to point out that technologies designed to connect us end up creating more alienation and loneliness. Perhaps it is also true that the supple taste of self-presentation has made us crave more for the raw material of living experience — not a chosen aura of intimacy, but something that might be called ” profound privacy”, glimpses of life unequipped as one you actually live. Given that this material is subject to ignorance of what it describes, it is rare and ephemeral. Crafted to perfection Enlarge the background being violated from time to time by her topless husband; shared screen shows a desktop folder labeled divorce; A politician’s irritation aside, her aide was caught on a hot microphone.
Back when public life was in full swing – the pre-pandemic era when restaurants were crowded and offices were running at full capacity – our lives were rife with moments of accidental surveillance: Phone calls came in from the next room, domestic complaints were broadcast on the subway. Such glimpses of other people’s lives can be a strange consolation, a reminder, if nothing else, that you’re not the only one whose private life isn’t normally lived. follow the sparkly social calm model you’ve shown online. It’s a hard truth to remember in times of isolation. Writer Megan Stielstra wrote an essay a few years ago about how her baby video monitor, which had two frequencies, picked up her neighbor’s kid’s food. In the loneliness of new motherhood, she found herself switching between channels, watching this other sleeping infant and looking for signs of its mother, who would occasionally enter the frame. One night, she heard a woman sobbing. “I shouldn’t have listened,” she wrote, “but for the first time since my son was born, I don’t feel alone.”
As for your question about the ethics of wiretapping, it sounds like the law is on your side. In 2013, an airport board chairman spoke freely, on the balcony of a hotel, with his vice president about firing an airport executive on grounds of discrimination. , then realized that he had phoned his assistant, who had recorded the entire conversation. The chairman emphasized that his assistant had broken the law by eavesdropping on his private conversations, but the court disagreed: “A person knowingly operates a device capable of inadvertently revealing his or her conversations. themselves to third-party listeners and failing to take simple precautions to prevent such exposure have no reasonable expectation of privacy.” (Additionally, the court also noted that telephony potentially locked down.) Since such accidents are more common among people of a certain age, it is tempting to consider this a generational breakdown. How often? Rudy Giuliani journalist dial It seemed, for a time, to reinforce that an administration that remained undaunted by mass opposition and the rule of law would self-destruct through aging and technological incompetence.
I hope, Scuttle Butt, that you don’t harbor such animosity towards your parents — or anyone else that secures a spot in your contacts. With that in mind, I can recommend the Golden Rule. Do you want someone to hear your private life without your knowledge? Surely you are not careless enough to let this happen. But ancient wisdom held that life tends to be morally symmetrical. You will reap what you sow, and reap what you sow. What lies in the dark will come to light, and you may even wake up one day to find yourself at the end of the generational divide. Few of us today believe that such justice is codified in the laws of the universe, but strangely enough, it is reflected in modern communication technologies, which tend to follow suit. two directions. Where there are speakers, there is most likely a microphone. The device receiving the video feed also has a camera. The truth only revealed about the wife in the Cheever story after it was too late. “Turn that off,” she told her husband in a moment of panic. “Perhaps they can hear we. ”
To be honest,
Cloud
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This article appeared in the October 2021 issue. Follow now.
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