While the Internet has given rise to a new species of ‘e-prodigies’, it is also responsible for the disposal of another. Following the recent footage of John Galliano’s anti-Semitic display at a Parisian bar, it appears that even the most illustrious of men are not immune to the muzzle of a camera’s lens. Politicians, football personalities and what has once been thought of as an untouchable species, fashion royalty, fall subject to the authority of viral Internet streaming.
Earlier this year we saw Sky lose two of its long-standing football TV personalities, Andy Gray and Richard Keys, due to a sexist rant about a female referee not knowing the offside rule because of her gender. The two men, believing their microphones to be off, indulged in the misogynistic banter which resulted in Gray being sacked from the network and Keys being forced to resign shortly after.
Even highly influential politicians are making similar technical slips. An unforgettable example is Gordon Brown’s challenging run-in with the passionate Gillian Duffy during the 2010 General Election where he was subsequently caught on camera complaining that their conversation was “a disaster” and that “she's just a sort of bigoted woman that said she used to be Labour.” He later lost the election, no doubt the incident put a dent in Labour votes, to the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Coalition that has also recently succumbed to a notorious ‘microphone still-on’ mishap. Nick Clegg, after a Q&A session in Nottingham, was overheard joking to David Cameron: ”If we keep doing this we won’t find anything to bloody disagree on in the bloody TV debates.” While less serious than that of Brown’s slip, it is awarded YouTube immortality and will fuel future accusations of any loss of Liberal Democrat identity in the Coalition.
These incidents aside, Galliano’s exposure is far more unsavoury and by its very nature cannot be so easily viewed as careless verbal outbursts that time and a formal apology can attempt to heal. The fashion guru’s rant was utterly immoral and leads to a more focused inspection of our human rights system. Do our human rights overlap into the digital world? In Western society, we have the right to free speech, the right to freedom of expression, the right to live in a society free from prejudice. Although we may not have a freestanding law of the right to privacy, most people are taught to respect it. Most would feel that they should have their say in what different groups of people know about them. This may be so on your Facebook account, as Mark Zuckerberg so strongly declares, however, it is not in life and it is especially absent within the infinite wilderness of the digital world.
Moreover, the layers of hierarchical issues in today’s society are evermore incompatibly interwoven. We no longer have ‘one society.’ All of us are part of a local society, a global society and now a digital society. There is no order of hierarchy in the digital society and as such, a new type of primitive battleground has been born where the powerful have fallen into the bulls-eye. In digital society, everyone has a piece of land to stake out as their own.
There is now a new ‘survival of the fittest’ and the weak-minded and immoral will eventually die out in the digital age. Cyber space has become the waterhole.
