This is, according to a new book, the new age of worldwide paranoia. The last age was before my time, in the ‘70s, when events like Watergate, the Vietnam War, the Cold War and what was then Red China flexing its muscles combined with a bunch of style setters wearing shoes with clear plastic heels big enough to be filled with water and a goldfish to set everybody’s teeth on edge. This was also the era of diamonds in your teeth, although that has nothing to do with paranoia.
Maybe there was some reason to be paranoid in those crazy days; maybe it was just general craziness.
Today’s paranoia is, as the old joke says, justified. After all you’re not paranoid if somebody’s actually after you. And trust me, somebody’s after you… from your cell phone company tracking your phone calls to your ISP tracking your Web viewing to your cable company tracking what ads you watch, somebody’s watching you.
But, like goldfish in plastic heels, things can get a little out of hand. A Baltimore start-up called SpotCrime has launched an interactive TV app with DirecTV that gives DirecTV viewers “near” real-time—guess that means they don’t shout, “Look out! There’s a burglar in your den!”—crime data, including listings of local crime activity and a map of where it’s all happening.
First-time homebuyers will, no doubt, be enthused to learn that those bucolic woods behind their houses are teeming with moonshiners and that the nearby field of flowing grass is actually grass of another sort.
This is the kind of interactive application that will draw a big, mixed, audience. There will be the voyeurs, those folks who just have to know everything about what’s going on in their neighborhoods. There will be the paranoid, increasingly stepping towards the boundaries of agoraphobia. And of course there will be the criminals, sitting home at night looking at the local crime reports and learning it’s not worth going after Billy Smith’s place because the James Gang already cleaned it out.
About the only people who probably won’t be happy about this are the local authorities, who, in the end, will make the whole thing go or not go. That’s why I’m a bit paranoid.
SpotCrime, in a prepared statement, said its business is to “pull crime incident data from multiple sources, including state and local police departments and validated news sources, to produce a comprehensive record of local crime information.”
Not to shoot holes in that model, but if the police and other local authorities were willing to talk about local crime, wouldn’t the stories be in the newspapers and on TV? They’re not because, among other thing, local crime is not good for local business or local property values so it’s better not to talk up what’s going on.
There’s a limit to how much paranoia you can drive for a profit. The local TV news steps up to the line—and sometimes crosses it—every evening. SpotCrime, were it to ever really take off, would probably step so far over it would be reporting crime in another county. It’s one thing to know you’re being watched; another to participate in the watching as a voyeur; and quite another to have that information affect your home value. How long do you think it will take until that lesson is learned?
