Eavesdropping (27 page)

I’m an eavesdropper. I listen in on conversations everywhere I go … I’m fascinated to hear little snippets of other people’s lives… I love Facebook because it’s even better than eavesdropping on people’s conversations. You get to be part of people’s lives and know what’s happening with them from the mundane, to the bizarre, to the dramatic. And you can insert yourself into the conversation, unlike when you’re eavesdropping!                  Tara Mahady, age 20

Y
EARS
ago Richard Dawkins pointed out that if Nature builds something, it will get used, even if it is no longer beneficial or is counter-productive.
¹
Like a battery that, as advertised, “keeps on going and going,” biological drives persistently look for ways to express themselves. When it was no longer necessary to police their neighborhoods, people kept policing them anyway. When it was no longer necessary to vet strangers, people kept looking for cracks in human personas. People kept their eyes and ears open, they told themselves, because it was only prudent to do so. Lives worked better when they knew what others, including social and business competitors, were planning and doing; and they were respected, even admired, for knowing things that others did
not. But this functional perspective overlooks something. What if tuning in to each other’s lives produced no tangible results at all? Would we quit eavesdropping if it were
only
enjoyable?

We have witnessed drives to display and monitor, and to conceal and eavesdrop, across a broad range of plants, birds, fish, and mammals, including the other primates. We have also discussed the adaptive value of eavesdropping in the evolution of our own species. The human drive to control what is known about others and ourselves has remained in force, and at high levels of operation, since its emergence. In the past ten to fifteen thousand years, however, there were enormous changes in domestic and personal life, and these changes altered the ways—and the reasons—that people would peer into the private lives of others.

The changes occurred in two major waves. The first involved increases in privacy, which began with the structural kind that afforded solitude, but subsequently expanded to include social and psychological means of isolation. In earlier chapters we saw that settlements, domestic walls, and cultural sequelae modified our ancestors’ ability to control and access personal information. My purpose here is to discuss the second wave—a cascade of developments that prepared human minds for the new systems of personal display.

English professor Laurie McNeill has written that the personal diary, once a life-history log that was strictly private, has become a genre of choice for the “life writers” on the Internet.
²
These “writers” are ordinary people who, before the emergence of the new modalities, had few if any ways to bring their stories to an audience of millions.
³
One diarist wrote that what she loved about online journals and diaries was “the paradoxical combination of
complete anonymity
and a
startling level of intimacy.”
⁴

Life-readers on the Internet seem to love opportunities to sample the confessions of strangers, but McNeill was not all that charmed by the experience. “I’ve learned too much I didn’t need to know about too many people’s everyday lives—lives without anything particularly extraordinary to recommend them, except the diarists’ own sense of importance and relevance,” she wrote. “Some journals make me feel guilty, as if I have been looking at texts I should not be reading, that are too personal and not intended for me to see. I ‘lurk’ on diary sites.” As a researcher, McNeill knew that she was not the intended audience for this material, nor did she have anything in common with the writers. “Consequently,” she confessed, “I felt as if I was an eavesdropper… not a welcomed participant.”
⁵

One of the electronic diary systems, Facebook, began in 2004 as a social network site. It now has at least 400 million members, and has daily site visits that number in the
billions
. Each member posts personal material on a “wall” and sets up links with “friends.” Having spent some time reading the interactions among these friends, one Facebook user wrote, “it’s even better than eavesdropping on people’s conversations.”

Two years after the launch of Facebook another life-writing system began. It was twitter, a social networking and “microblogging” system that enables users to send messages and read the “tweets” of others. Tweets areshort (140-character) comments about some aspect of the twitterers’ lives—famously, what they had for breakfast that morning. Senders can elect to restrict transmission to those in their circle of friends or allow access to anyone. What makes twitter interesting to eavesdroppers is that each member has a number of approved followers, and these individuals can
lurk
, that is, can monitor each other’s “tweets,” as if listening to a large group conversation with perfect intelligibility and no interruptions. Like an eavesdropper, they can choose merely to “listen” and remain silent.

The humans that lived fifteen thousand years ago were no less human than we. But their brains, like ours, were outfitted with mechanisms that were preconfigured to take the perspectives of others. If they had stumbled across computers or cell phones they could not have guessed their intended uses. Nothing in their life experiences would have prepared them for twitter. But something happened—quite a few things, in fact—that helped to ready us, their descendants, for what was to come.

The new biographical systems that seemed to burst on the scene overnight are actually rooted in a number of ancient developments. The first involved a reduction in direct perceptual experience. Walls and population increases made it necessary to take in information about others when they were physically absent, relying on the representations—the gossip—of intermediaries. The advent of widespread literacy and new forms of creativity made it possible to appraise the moods, sentiments, and subtle behaviors of others in complete solitude. In time there were letters, diaries, biographies, and novels, all of which offered intimate experience to others, known or unknown to the author, who would sample that experience at later times and different places, and interpret it from a perspective provided by a wholly different culture. These new modalities altered the physical and psychological relationship of humans-in-interaction and, in doing so, boosted the role of imagery and imagination.

Passing almost unnoticed was a change in the
functions
of perceptual exploration. Where observation had been, and continued to be, carried out directly, individuals remained concerned with information that might help them to ward off or solve environmental problems. With a tilt toward mediated experience, however, the subject matter often was individuals known only to one of the parties; and in literature there was a shift of focus to beings that
were
not even real
. If there was no need to keep track of these
fictitious beings
, the motive for an increasing share of this sort of
virtual eavesdropping
would have to be found elsewhere.

When eavesdropping was stripped of its ultimate and objective functions, it could now be seen, with unprecedented clarity, that eavesdroppers were exercising an evolved disposition, and doing so on a proximate motive, an incentive that involved little more than a pleasurable sensation. This, by definition, was psychological. In their attention to beings that were constructed and not real, eavesdroppers were drawn to activities, frequently, that were
merely intimate
. It was finally possible to view eavesdropping as an act that was functional in some new and more internal way, a way that could be seen as purely hedonic.

These trends continued and intensified with the advent of photography and the printed media, including gossip columns and glossy photo magazines; and of telephones, films, radio, and television, including soap operas, talk shows, and reality TV.

If unintelligible to our ancestors, alphabets and computers are now considered good ways to display and sample intimate behavior
—virtually
. Not that this poses a challenge to human beings. Purely by living in groups, individuals must regularly infer the mental states of others, and act
as though
their inferences are correct. Studies of brain and other physiological functions indicate that real and virtual experience recruit or precipitate similar neural and hormonal activity. But how is it that human minds were conditioned to seek and interpret virtual experience
through the media
? How did the trend that led us to Internet diaries begin?

“The present age,” wrote Samuel Johnson in 1753, “may be styled with great propriety
The Age of Authors
; for, perhaps, there was never a time, in which men of all degrees of ability, of every kind of
education, of every profession and employment, were posting with ardour so general to the press.”
⁶
Many of these “postings” were personal diaries. In the eighteenth century, record numbers of French and English citizens began to keep personal diaries. Many of these, like the diaries maintained by Samuel Pepys in the 1660s, were intended to be private but were later published by others. Some, like James Lackington’s
Memoirs of the First Forty-Five Years
, which appeared in 1791, were published by the authors themselves.

The appearance of personal diaries is thought to reflect a growing need for individuals to make sense of their lives, and in a time of increasing individuation, a belief that one’s own experiences were significant in some way. Such diaries, it was hoped, would have meaning for others, but some were mainly entertaining. In 1830 a series of autobiographies appeared in a special edition entitled
Autobiography; a Collection of the Most Instructive and Amusing Lives Ever Published
.

Many personal diaries came with locks and keys, and the material entered therein was surely too intimate for the eyes of others. In her book on the use of diaries to create self in seventeenth-century England, Brigitte Glaser concludes that life history writing paved the way for the novel, inasmuch as writers in both forms tread the boundaries between fact and fiction.
⁷
I believe that the structure and focus of novels, and the characteristics of their readers, can tell us a great deal about eavesdropping, particularly the category of eavesdropping that focuses on intimate experience.

Intimate scenes, especially ones that included sex and adultery, have featured prominently in novels since the inception of the genre. In 1740 Samuel Richardson published a novel featuring Pamela Andrews, a fifteen-year-old waiting-maid to a woman referred to only as “Lady B.” The story is epistolary, much of it
told through letters that Pamela writes to her father or mother, some of it through a journal or diary that she kept. When Lady B dies, Pamela, though virtuous and virginal, is beset first by Mr. B’s son, then other men. Each time, through her own wits, she narrowly escapes moral disaster. Eventually Mr. B begins to pursue Pamela as well. Though concerned about the social distance between them, he eventually casts misgivings aside and marries his servant.

When
Pamela
hit the bookshops, it caused a sensation. In the first year there were five printings and total sales of approximately 20,000 copies. But
Pamela
also inspired a riot of unauthorized appropriations, begat a series of like-structured novels, and launched a whole new industry.
⁸
Romance novels were in, and they stayed in. In the early nineteenth century the vast majority of the books in commercial lending libraries were romance novels.

In epistolary novels, readers have the experience, as John Vernon pointed out, of reading someone else’s mail. “If novels tell secrets,” he wrote, “what else is a reader but a kind of eavesdropper?”
⁹
“Richardson’s work demands that the reader continually be the voyeur,” wrote Lennard Davis. Reading
Pamela
, he said, is not different from “staring through the keyhole … Bared bosoms, stolen kisses, and supine, helpless figures are the essence of Richardson’s eroticism, and the reader of the work is placed within the text as voyeur.”
¹⁰

Like eavesdropping, novels once had an illicit quality. They featured rogues and courtesans that readers were unlikely to encounter in genteel life. In the eighteenth century, the prime ingredient of romance novels was bodice-ripping sex. A century later simple sex was no longer sufficient. People wanted adultery.

And they got it. If novels needed to address issues that intrigued prospective consumers, adultery was surely the way to go. The public sensorium was already attuned to it. In fact, many of the nineteenth-century novels that were canonized as
great
, wrote Tony Tanner in
Adultery in the Novel
, were built on adultery. Without it, he wrote, “the history of the novel would, indeed, have been very different—and much poorer.”
¹¹