Diana Wichtel: Living in a culture of full disclosure

Andy Warhol said: "In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes." Greta Garbo said: "I vant to be alone." These two conflicting impulses - "Look at me!" v"!@% off!" - play their part in making modern life the increasingly psychotic experience it is.

As people like Sally Ridge and Suzanne Paul continue to demonstrate, these days anyone can be a star. Thanks to the escalating democratisation of technology and the media, the most ordinary people can cash in their quarter of an hour on the reality shows that are eating primetime or, failing that, their own website.

The price for this Faustian pact with the self-gratification of celebrity, as Big Brother contestants and Mike Hosking are endlessly finding, is a loss of privacy.

Whatever privacy is these days. We live in a society under surveillance as never before by security cameras, speed cameras and each other. Big Brother is us. It makes you nostalgic for simpler times, when you could live without leaving DNA and digital traces scattered like confetti.

When I was a child we sometimes whiled away a rainy afternoon making crank phone calls, safe in the knowledge that nothing short of a major police investigation could catch us. We'd ring someone, tell them we were the phone company testing their phone and get them to stand across the room and whistle. Well, we thought it was hilarious and our hit rate was outstanding.

Do not try this at home. In these paranoid times you'd certainly be dobbed in and, almost before you've made them, calls can be traced. So can the contents of your computer. Even my dog will soon be microchipped. We are never truly alone, even at home.

Or at the school gym, as one poor schmuck in Quebec found out. His name is Ghyslain, but he's destined to be known forever, at least in cyberspace, as Star Wars Kid. At a loose end, a plump, bespectacled 15-year-old popped in a video and taped himself acting out an enthusiastic, if one-sided, light sabre battle using a golf ball retriever as a weapon. Hilarious.

He forgot to remove the tape and next thing he was an internet legend. Soon Star Wars Kid, the remix, was available, complete with appropriate music sound and special effects.

He is apparently not happy and you can see why. He's enduring all the scrutiny and intrusion of celebrity with none of the rewards. God invented agents for a reason.

To be fair, a sympathy fund was set up by kind netizens and raised US$4000 ($6825) in seven days but his parents are allegedly still threatening to sue. Meanwhile, the sequence was being downloaded as if there was someone naked in it which, thank God, there isn't.

Closer to home, and much closer to nakedness, is another digital sensation. The other day I received an extraordinary email attachment. Alert readers might have seen a small example in last week's Weekend Herald. It seems Sunday Star Times editor Sue Chetwin caused a stir at the Qantas Media Awards when she accepted an award from the Governor-General clad in an outfit that left no doubt as to the exact configurations of her thong undergarment.

News of this frock shock has reached Sydney's Daily Telegraph newspaper ("the G-G and the G-string scandal") as well as the computers of many startled journalists who didn't attend or weren't close enough to get a good look.

In this case, she knew she was being photographed, but rumour has it that being recycled as an eye-popping cyber oddity hasn't pleased her.

Still, if you knowingly go into public wearing what looks like a recently deceased possum slapped on your chest, with what appears to be a shower curtain with strategically placed windows of opportunity as a skirt (and it's difficult to see how this could be achieved by accident) you really are saying "look at me". And we did.

Chetwin willingly disclosed her g-string. Hillary Clinton is enhancing her chances of being the first woman President of the United States by telling all about the Monica Lewinsky business, an affair that constituted another historic moment for thong underwear, if a bit of a poke in the eye for privacy. Not to mention good taste.

Even as we try almost obsessively to define the boundaries of personal privacy (note the number of "privacy issues" raised in the news almost every day) we're fast having to adapt to living in a culture of full disclosure. That which is not disclosed for us by technology, we disclose ourselves.

Take the mania for internet diarising. They're known as "blogs", a suitably emetic-sounding name, and are popular with those who feel the need to tell the world what they had for dinner. One anxious blogger I read shared his penchant for wearing women's underwear. Why? He got back "encouraging" responses and felt better for fessing up.

I blame the decline of organised religion. Once we were private people with private lives, answerable only to the proper authorities and, should we have one, our private deity.

But talkback radio and television talk shows have long since taken over from the confessional. The days when only the eye of heaven could see into every corner of our lives are gone. Everyone's doing it. Judge not that ye be not judged by Holmes or Fair Go or some bored computer geek.

It makes a terrible kind of sense. In our secular, individualistic, market-driven, MMP times, when anyone can be a star or a politician, what is there left to aspire to but to be God?