Thursday, September 23, 2010

The Silent Spectator

We go on with our lives, in a frenzy; talking, sharing, blogging, scrapping - live and on the web. We share thoughts, photos, videos and information of all kinds. When we do this, how many of us actually give privacy a thought? And here, I do not only mean privacy settings blocking people unknown to us to pry on us. I also include the hundreds of acquaintances who are on our friend lists who have access to all our information. Enough has been spoken about these kinda issues. Strikingly, what I also include in this list, after deep thought, are some of our own friends. When I include friends here, I do not mean to say we share information in a threatening manner. In a group of friends, more often than not, there are smaller subsets of people who are closer amongst themselves. Or also, the group might consist of a lot of people and we initially connect considerably with only a few. It would take time before we get close to everyone in the group. But while hanging out as a group, we still share to the whole group. We might not be particularly close to a person. But that person hears your thoughts, listens to your jokes, peeks into your dreams and all this while you do not even credit this silent spectator. This silent spectator is slowly getting to know a lot about you, and you are not even aware of it. As I think about this, it is just a little freaky that you have exposed yourself to a lot of people, knowingly or unknowingly. It is also probably a little sad that you do not know or have not cared/ bothered to know more about this person who seems to know so much about you. At the end of the day, you might think that you are an enigma, but chances are that there are many silent spectators who know a lot about you, even when you might think no one else really knows you and no one really cares!

4 comments:

Karthik[:)] said...

Creepy sometimes, but then that kinda gives u a measure of how good you are at what u are ;)

Ashwini said...

Haha, when you put it that way, I cannot help but agree ;)

loop said...

wow! I loved this post. I have thought about this many times too. How do we draw a line between sharing and over-sharing! Complex, isn't it?

Ashwini said...

Thanks Indira :) Precisely. It's such a tough thing to do. And I guess gets freakier as we think more about it. Best thing would be to just take a chance :)