When society loses the line between public and private

By ILIR ÇUMANI

When society loses the line between public and private

The audiovisual materials that have flooded social networks and Albanian screens with an extraordinary intensity cannot be treated simply as another showbiz story.

The scale of their spread, the way they are consumed and the reaction they have produced in the public make this phenomenon much more than an ordinary event of the entertainment world.

What is happening requires a different look — colder, deeper, and beyond the curiosity that usually feeds a showbiz story.

The real story lies one step further: in the collective, almost unbridled desire to see; in the crowd’s secret pleasure; in the mechanism that turns a person’s private life into public merchandise.

It is precisely here that a much bigger problem begins than a video, a well-known figure or an intimate episode. There begins the problem of the line between what belongs to us and what belongs to the other, between information and voyeurism (the desire to observe the life of the other), between public interest and curiosity, between journalism and the consumption of human shame. Above all, between the citizen and the crowd.

Throughout human history, man has always been curious about the life of the other, and this is not a new invention of the internet age. Since the earliest human communities, the life of the other has been an object of observation, judgment, gossip and curiosity.

In traditional societies, however, there was a physical boundary. A secret travelled from one mouth to another, a story spread from one neighbourhood to another, but it followed the slow, quiet and human rhythm of time.

Technology has destroyed this rhythm. Today, a secret no longer travels from one person to another; it explodes immediately to unimaginable proportions, taking with it consequences that nobody foresees. An image no longer passes from hand to hand, but multiplies at a dizzying speed, going within a few moments beyond any possibility of control.

Now, an intimate material does not remain within the circle of a few people or confidential friends, but can within a few minutes become the object of thousands, even millions of eyes.

And here lies one of the greatest paradoxes of the digital age: the more means we have to communicate, the more fragile becomes man’s right to be alone.

Privacy was once considered a natural space of existence, whereas today it must be defended like a territory. And when this territory is invaded, the damage does not end with the first publication. It begins precisely there. Every click prolongs the life of the material. Every resharing recreates the exposure. Every comment adds another layer of judgment to the victim. Every search feeds the mechanism that keeps that content alive.

At this point, what began as a violation of privacy turns into a collective process of consuming the dignity of the other.

But why do we want to see what does not belong to us? This is the most interesting question, because the problem lies not only with the one who records or distributes the material, but also with the public that seeks it.

Human psychology has a complicated relationship with the forbidden. What is hidden often becomes more attractive. What society covers with shame can awaken a particular curiosity. Intimacy is precisely one of those territories where desire, shame, sexuality, jealousy, power and the fear of exposure meet.

When these elements are thrown into the public space, a powerful psychological mixture is created: man knows he should not look, but precisely this makes it harder not to look.

Here voyeurism ceases to be only an individual behaviour and turns into a social phenomenon. The crowd feels less responsible than the individual. When a thousand people watch, each of them can think that the responsibility lies somewhere else. “I only opened it.” “I only watched it.” “I only sent it to a friend.” “I only made a comment.” But thousands of such “onlys” build an entire machine.

Nobody feels himself the author of the damage and, nevertheless, the damage exists. This is one of the darkest paradoxes of the digital crowd: responsibility is distributed into thousands of hands and, precisely for this reason, it seems as if it exists nowhere.

In this mechanism there is also another, very important element: the attention economy. The internet does not necessarily reward what is most important.

It often rewards what provokes the strongest reaction. And what provokes more reaction than sex, betrayal, scandal, shame, fame and the public fall of a figure?

Thus man ceases to be a subject and becomes content. A human life is reduced to a few seconds. A relationship is reduced to a headline. A body becomes a click. A family becomes a comment. A personal drama becomes traffic.

This is perhaps the greatest anthropological change we are experiencing: once the community judged the individual through physical presence, whereas today the digital crowd can judge him without knowing him at all.

Once a reputation was built and destroyed within a relatively defined community, whereas today a person can be exposed before people he will never meet in his life.

An event that for the public lasts a few minutes can remain for the affected person a trauma with grave consequences for years, even irreparable ones.

This changes the very meaning of shame. Shame is no longer only a personal emotion, but this feeling can turn into a social punishment without a term.

And here appears a truth that is often forgotten: a public figure is not public property, and fame is not a contract for surrendering privacy.

An actor, singer, journalist, politician or television figure can be an object of public interest for his activity, for the statements he makes, for the function he exercises or for the responsibilities he holds.

But public status does not eliminate the private person. It does not annul the family, the body, intimacy and, above all, the right to have a space where the public has no right to enter. Because here lies a fundamental distinction, without which every debate about private life loses its meaning: the interest of the public is not the same thing as the curiosity of the public.

A piece of information can be very interesting and still have no real public interest.

It is precisely here that the boundary of journalism must also be set. Serious journalism is not judged as such only by what it manages to publish, but also by what it chooses not to publish. The power of the media lies not only in the ability to expose, but also in the ability to understand the consequences of exposure.

The professional question must not be only “is it true?”, but also “is it necessary?”, “does this serve the public?”, “what responsibility do we have towards the people who will be affected?”, “are we uncovering an abuse or simply feeding curiosity?”.

A material can be authentic and still not be worthy of publication. Factual truth is not automatically the same as the right to publish.

But in this whole story there is also a political dimension that must be treated with care. It is easy, especially in a polarised climate, to say that behind every scandal there is a political hand.

Such a claim requires proof and cannot be built only on the synchronisation of events, raising conspiracy theories that feed and incite the public imagination. But politics is not absent from this story in another, much deeper sense either. Politics is also about attention.

Democracy depends not only on what citizens know, but also on where they choose to focus their attention.

A society can have an endless amount of information and, still, not be informed about what really matters. This happens when the emotions and topics that attract the most attention constantly draw citizens away from issues that require facts, documents, investigation and responsibility.

Democracy is damaged not only when information is missing, but also when attention is constantly directed at what excites, instead of focusing on what matters.

It is not necessary for a director to exist to produce the distraction; the mechanism of the attention market itself can be enough.

It is enough for portals to chase clicks, for algorithms to reward the emotional reaction and for the public to demand spectacle.

It is enough for a financial document to seem boring, while an intimate video becomes viral. It is also enough for the debate on institutions to be replaced by the debate on people’s private relationships. At that point, we no longer need censorship, because society itself has shifted its attention.

This is why the problem is also political, even though we must not necessarily reduce it to a political conspiracy. In a democracy, public attention is a source of power. Where attention goes, the debate goes too. Where the debate goes, public pressure goes. And where the pressure goes, responsibility can go too.

Therefore, a society that consumes individuals’ intimate lives without limit risks losing the ability to distinguish what is interesting from what is important.

A video can be extremely interesting and have no public importance at all. A contract, an administrative decision, a tender, an institutional document can be boring to read and, nevertheless, have consequences on the lives of thousands of people.

Here also lies the greatest risk for a democratic society: not only the concealment of information, but the trivialisation of important information through a constant flood of materials that produce emotion.

When everything becomes spectacle, nothing remains truly serious any more. When a scandal is produced every day, the very word “scandal” loses its weight. When every public figure is turned into an object of hunting, the public begins to forget that behind the screen there are people.

And here we must return to the human dimension, because it is the most important. In a video, two or three people may appear, but behind them there may be parents, children, spouses, brothers, friends, colleagues and people who have done nothing, but who are forced to live with the consequences of the exposure.

While the public watches a screen, the family may experience a crisis. When the public watches a material of someone’s intimate life, that someone else may experience shame, fear, isolation, anxiety and loss of control over his own life. The public closes the phone and continues the rhythm of the day normally, but the exposed person may no longer be able to close the story.

This is why we must also change the question. It is not enough to ask whether the material is true, but how this material of someone’s private life was obtained, with what right it was published, who benefits from its distribution and what consequence it produces.

When institutions investigate the way intimate materials have been obtained and distributed, the institutional question shifts from curiosity about the content to responsibility for the violation of privacy.

This is an essential change, because a healthy society must deal not only with what was seen, but also with the reason why it was made possible for it to be seen without the consent of the persons involved.

Perhaps here lies the greatest paradox of this whole story. We live in a time when we talk a lot about freedom, but we forget that freedom is not only the freedom to see and to publish. It is also the other’s freedom not to be exposed. We talk about the public’s right to know, but we forget that that right is not unlimited. We talk about transparency, but we confuse institutional transparency with stripping the individual of privacy. We talk about journalism, but sometimes we confuse journalism with the ability to attract clicks.

A civilised society is not the one that knows everything about everyone, but the one that knows best what it has no right to demand to know. A responsible media is not the one that publishes everything it manages to get its hands on, but the one that knows how to set the line between information and harm. A free citizen is not the one who clicks on everything served to him, but the one who has the ability to ask himself whether he is being informed or being used.

Therefore, in the end, the issue is not only what happened in the private lives of some people, but what is also happening to us as a society. What is happening to our boundaries, to our shame, to our curiosity, to our ethics, to our journalism, to our politics and to the way we consume the pain of the other.

When a society loses sensitivity towards privacy, it gradually also loses sensitivity towards dignity. And when the dignity of the other becomes content, we are all impoverished a little as people.

Perhaps that is why the most important question is not the one that pushes us to click. It is not even: “What was in the video?”

The real question is much more uncomfortable and, at the same time, much more human: What was inside us that made us want to see it?