Branding, Culture, Politics, and Everything in Between

In my last post I talked about how the copyright wars were reframing the meaning of “criminal”, and in a post before that, I had expressed my worry that on the internet, being “in the know” or even being “first” were values that trumped even empathy. Both of these phenomena represent (to me at least) the darker side of the web, or at least they are an indication of still-developing social codes.

Both of these relate to a subject I had sworn I wouldn’t touch because it has been covered to death in other blogs and I found the subject just a tad too sensationalist for this blog, but the conclusion of this phenomenon and how it highlights contemporary culture was just too important for me to ignore.

Here in Finland, the ad world has been abuzz about a certain 20 000€ personal ad that was taken out in the leading Finnish newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat. In the ad, some man is calling after a woman he had seen and fallen for in a bar here in Helsinki. The buzz around the ad has been basically regarding if it is a viral campaign or not, and if it is, which agency did it and for whom?

Well, to the joy of romantics all over, behind the ad was a real person actually looking for his lost love. But what gave me a real pause was the way the man was discovered. The folks at Muro BBS had hacked his gmail account (which he had posted in the ad) by conning Google and thus salvaging the account’s password. This way they were able to discover the true identity of our digital Romeo.

I’m shocked that I have yet to see a single blog post or news piece condemning the way the identity was dug up, the only backlash I’ve seen was one poster at Stealthunit voicing his disapproval (his post was the inspiration for me writing about this). The method the Muro folks used was nothing short of a felony. The yellow press was more than happy to jump on the discovered identity and publish the man’s photo (albeit with his face blurred); I guess falling in love is no longer a private act in modern society, or at least one person’s right for privacy is secondary to the curious mob’s thirst for gossip. This is, to me at least, both a severe lapse of media literacy (the ad has been in the media, ergo he gets the celebrity treatment) and lack of social precedent guiding behavior. Since when has taking out a personal ad (granted, a 20 000€ personal ad) qualified as becoming a celebrity and forfeiting your privacy?

What I find ironic is that the Muro folks fit the demographic who are very vocal about protecting their own privacy on the web. But I guess compromising someone’s privacy is OK as long as it doesn’t happen to me. This is all very troubling to me, and I think it’s going to be a while until at least somewhat civil social codes are established on the internet.