Governing the New Private-Turned-to-Public Sphere

The president is a hot celeb? I found pic of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono amongst other worldwide celebrities at http://www.riya.com, a picture search engine. From Hu Jintao to Kelly Hu (not related to the president) to Pamela Anderson, I found their nice, print-quality pictures. A digital picture has signatures (be found at properties). Riya search engine will look at the same signature the time any digital picture is saved, digitized and uploaded on the Net. I take pictures of me from my camera, and other pictures that have my signature or similar typography could be searched easily.

Crazy huh? I am living in a world that anyone could no longer hide, unless I am living in remote island Pulau Wetar or something. No electricity nor satellite phone.

In this crazy kind of world, I assume everyone is nice and reasonable. A nice blogstalker like me would not follow the virtual link to IRL. I send emails only to by beloved, real-life friends or colleagues. Never reply an email with “Assalamualekum” or “My Client Died and Left Some Inheritance to Noone” subjects.

I still wonder how on earth anyone could do such work, and noone got arrested for intruding with such emails. No governing bodies ever officially declared such thing as a crime. There is Internet Engineering Task Force and Social Media (from Wikipedia to Facebook, from Cyworld to Gawker Stalker) to consider as new institutions that govern the virtual world.

For me, whatever they are and do, I am going to be strict: draw a definite line of IRL and the virtual world. Or else I cannot explore other parts of beautiful beaches and mountains and heritage of Indonesia. I am just sitting here with my coffee and pajamas. Get a life?