The following article caught my eye and I thought I should post it for your situational awareness.
Stay safe out there!
Cellphones, social networks make eavesdropping OK?
By Sharon Jayson, USA TODAY
David Smith has heard — or rather overheard — it all while on planes, including the sexual details of a stranger's hookup at a business meeting.
"It feels like you're eavesdropping, but in another sense, you're forced to share something that falls under the heading of 'too much information,' " says Smith, 54, of Austin, a retired consultant and frequent business traveler.
A century ago, when the first home phones were "party lines" shared by neighbors, "worrying you were being listened in on was a common feature of American culture," says sociologist Claude Fischer of the University of California-Berkeley.
Oh, how times have changed.
Now, we're not only unconcerned about overheard phone calls, we purposely broadcast our personal business to large groups of "friends" and "followers" on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.
SECRETS: Some people still keep a diary in age of Facebook and blogs
As a result, we're fast becoming a nation of casual eavesdroppers, where every day we tune in to a constant stream of updates on what others are saying and doing, from where they're about to eat lunch (complete with photos) to their conversations with others.
All this sharing, some experts say, may be feeding a tendency toward exhibitionism, and devaluing the very privacy that earlier generations so desired.
But not everyone says the rise of widespread social snooping is such a bad thing.
Eavesdropping is an "evolved human practice that is natural and often beneficial," says John Locke, a linguistics professor at the City University of New York.
"We teach people they should mind their own business," he says, but "that's extremely bad advice. It's dangerous because you won't see the terrorist next door making a bomb; you won't see the kids being abused, or the husband beating up a wife. If there wasn't any eavesdropping, if people minded their own business and ignored what they saw and heard, how would you prevent and how would you solve crimes?"
Locke, author of a new book, Eavesdropping: An Intimate History, says apes keep an eye on each other to maintain order, and we humans have neighborhood watch programs.
But eavesdropping is more than just listening in. It's glancing over at someone else's laptop screen to see what they're doing. It's peering into an apartment window as you walk by. It's catching a glimpse through a door that's slightly ajar. It's trolling Facebook to see what your friends are saying to others.
And yes, it's a bit thrilling, he says. "There is something quite tantalizing about this behavior."
But is it really eavesdropping if they're broadcasting and we can't help overhearing?
"I don't regard it at all as me eavesdropping," says Etti Baranoff, who has overheard plenty of cellphone conversations in 15 years of traveling twice a week as an associate professor of insurance and finance at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond . "We think no matter where we are, we are in our own living room, but we are not. We are walking with our phones as if we are in our own homes."
No keyholes needed
"It's a generational and cultural change," says W. Keith Campbell, a professor of psychology at the University of Georgia in Athens .
"That old image of sticking your ear to a keyhole — we don't need to do it anymore," Campbell says. "Our personal lives are much more open."
What's changed is that more private behavior, such as personal phone calling, happens in public today, says social psychologist Robert Kraut of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh .
It may seem like eavesdropping, but the "victim" is no longer the person being eavesdropped on, he says — it's "the overhearers, who can't get away. What had once been private behavior is now being shoved in their face."
Fischer, author of Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character, says it's ironic that "a cellphone call overheard while walking down the street is a throwback to (party lines) where everybody knew everybody's business."
Whether eavesdropping is by choice or forced makes a big difference, Locke says.
"If someone is speaking low, people will lean in the direction of the message. But if people are speaking loudly on a cellphone, they'll back the other way. We resent the fact they are broadcasting personal information. We want the option of tuning in."
This dichotomy is evident in new research on public cellphone use. One study, to be presented to the National Communication Association in November, included 15- to 20-minute observations of 19,741 people using cellphones on a college campus from 2005 to 2008. Researcher Yi-Fan Chen of Old Dominion University in Norfolk , Va. , found that mobile devices "blurred boundaries between public and private spaces." Her 2009 survey found cellphones were most often used on the street, observers said, "in a loud or annoying manner."
Another study, in the journal Behaviour & Information Technology in 2004, found cellphone conversations "significantly more noticeable and annoying than face-to-face" at the same volume.
"There is an idea in social psychology that you can talk about intimate things to strangers because they are not part of your network and are not considered to be a risk," Campbell says. "If you're actually in public and clearly don't know people, it's almost seen as a private space."
Some say today's mix of easy information sharing and celebrity-driven media culture is making us more narcissistic. With Facebook and Twitter, we're more willing to showcase our lives for all who want to look or listen. We can tell our friends our innermost thoughts, but those who aren't so close also see.
"Go into an airport and you hear people talking in a particularly loud voice, so people think they're important or have status. There's a subset of people that ties in more with narcissism and attention-seeking that are using these channels to get attention," says Campbell , co-author of The Narcissism Epidemic.
Gleaning new information
But the fact that you can watch or listen on social networks without engaging "has some real advantages," says Keith Hampton, assistant professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia .
"It's exposure to little bits of information you would never otherwise have had access to," he says. "And little bits of information can be really important. You have access to new ideas, and not from very close social ties that know what you know."
Pop culture expert Richard Lachmann, a sociology professor at the University at Albany , State University of New York, says it's not just the idea of privacy that has changed. He believes the very nature of eavesdropping is up for debate, since people are willing to share more and more personal information.
"Everybody still has a notion of eavesdropping. It's somebody trying to hear something they haven't been invited to hear. What's changing is what goes in that category," he says.
"It used to be people had a real long list of things that were private and only heard by a few, and a short list of things that would be public. For many people, that's moved from one list to another."
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