Daily Telegraph, August 24, 2012
With photographs of Prince Harry’s bottom now enlightening hundreds of millions of computer screens around the internet world, and when everybody with a smart phone has become a potential paparazzo, I wonder, has the time not arrived for a new social etiquette with regard to picture taking?
I mean, it’s all very well St James’s Palace huffing that the photographs are “a gross invasion of the Prince’s privacy” – and, much as they have amused the rest of us, they clearly are – this isn’t only about Harry.
It’s about you and me, too, and all of us who find ourselves captured on camera phones, whether we know it or not, and whether we like it or not.
We all accept that CCTV watches us every time we go shopping. It helps keep us safe, we’re told. Fair enough. And in this digital age, we usually don’t mind if we are on the edge of some stranger’s photograph at a party of social event. None of us has a copyright on our own image.
Why should we mind? Freezing the moment is just harmless fun, usually preserving nothing more than an inconsequential memory. So, when I watched the twinkling of thousands of phones in the night sky at the Olympic Beach Volley Ball on Horse Guards Parade the other week I have to say it enriched the experience. And no doubt I was in some people’s shots, too.
But there can be a dark side to camera phones. Unflattering images are used to bully schoolchildren on the internet, while some “friends” just can’t resist posting pictures of their drunken mates on Facebook for the world to see, every foolish moment saved.
And now, as summer draws to a close, inevitably more than one young woman will be returning from her summer holiday and perhaps worrying slightly about that lovely bloke she got off with when she’d perhaps had a few too many?
It was only a holiday romance, but, back at his chalet, did he take pictures of her with his camera phone? And, if so, did he delete the snaps, or are they even now being passed around to his pals’ phones as bragging exhibits? It happens.
When we’re young we all do things we wouldn’t want our mothers to see, let alone our girl friend or boy friend. We’re human. And until recently those little private indiscretions remained exactly that – private, and best quickly forgotten.
But the internet linked camera phone doesn’t understand private, and, unless told to do so, doesn’t forget either. At the blink of a shutter a moment’s infelicitous behaviour, such as a drink fuelled snog at the office Christmas party, can become embarrassing, even damaging evidence the morning after.
In these situations, or indeed the one in which Prince Harry found himself in Las Vegas, a camera phone isn’t just a toy. It can, in the hands of the unscrupulous or stupid, be a weapon.
Recently hardly a tabloid week has seemed complete without a snatched shot of a celebrity fashion malfunction, while bigger stars are frequently dismayed to find images of themselves that were never meant for public viewing. Think only of singer Tulisa and film actress Demi Moore.
Obviously the people who take and profit from such photographs are good-for–nothings, but the cheapness and availability of camera phones now affects all of us. Mostly, they are used for benefit and delight, with pictures of children taken and sent to relatives in a second.
But they can spoil moments, too. Remember how we watched the thousands of athletes marching into the Olympic Arena at the opening ceremony, and how disappointing it was to see them taking photographs of the event in which they were the stars, thus somehow diminishing the grandeur of the moment.
In this digital age there will always be those who will take pictures of surprising or shocking events, as some did when film director Tony Scott tragically threw himself to his death in Los Angeles this week. It’s an understandable reaction.
But it seems to me that although there can never be a Law of Harry’s Bottom to protect our day to day privacy from camera phones, a new mode of internet manners and social mores must soon begin to emerge, when a freedom to take and publish pictures of social gatherings isn’t blithely assumed, just because it’s possible.
That’s how society rubs along. It’s what manners exist for. And, right now, we need some digital manners or we’ll all soon find ourselves always on our guard, feeling like public figures or the Royal Family – Harry apart, I suppose, who let both his hair and his trunks down.
