The importance of practising safe text

The communications revolution is a wonderful thing. Just think how easy it is to communicate by email and by text. Just think how easy it is to say the things that you might hesitate to say directly to someone. Just think how easy it is to flirt and to tease and to make suggestive noises…

It’s a method that’s often and increasingly used by people who are afraid to come out and say it: they send a text instead. And, especially if they have a few drinks on them, they can make advances and offers they’d normally feel too inhibited to hazard.
But what happens if the recipient is blessed, shall we say, with a sense of history? What happens if he or she believes that the text of the text might just come in handy at some point in the future?
Answers on a post card please. Or rather a text message will do…

Over the past few days, David Beckham has been dragged into a fresh sex controversy, accused of having an affair with his former personal assistant, Rebecca Loos.
The story was broken in the News Of The World, which carried a piece that was heavily based on an interview with a ‘friend’ of Loos – the PA who was herself a former employee of SFX, Beckham’s management company, at the time of his move from Manchester United to Real Madrid.
What makes the story different from the average kiss and tell is that there are text messages in existence that appear to back it up, allowing the Spanish stunner (copyright News Of The World) to distance herself from the revelations. The details of the titillatory texts have been helpfully published almost in full by the British media, with the NOTW leading the way.
David Beckham has issued a statement denying that he had an affair with Loos, insisting that he has in recent months become accustomed to reading “more and more ludicrous stories” about his private life. But the degree of ‘plausible deniability’ has been narrowed considerably by the existence of the content of the text messages.
So are they for real? And if so, how did they get into the public domain? And, more to the point, should newspapers have published the explicit details of the texts either way?

The familiar argument advanced by newspapers in cases like this is that Becks and his wife ‘Posh’ are both involved in public life, and have made a fortune as a result, and as such they are fair game. Bullshit. The level of invasion of privacy into the lives of individuals that has become the norm in newspapers in Britain is an embarrassment to journalists and to journalism.
What gives a newspaper the right to use material of this kind? Hacks will try to tell you that they publish stuff like this in the public interest. There is a difference, however, between the public interest, and what the public are interested in.
If the latter were to be the sole criterion, then no aspect of anyone’s life would be deemed to be off limits. Basically, we are a race of nosy fuckers, who take a prurient interest in other people’s business, and in particular in their indiscretions – especially those of a sexual nature.
But how is it in the public interest in any meaningful sense that a bit of sex on the side, on the part of David Beckham, if that is indeed what was involved, should be given the front page treatment? And how many of the hacks who churn this stuff out themselves live the kind of (allegedly) wholesome lives that would stand up to the level of scrutiny they impose on others? A postage stamp will do for the answer to that one.
There is a difference if a priest, who preaches on issues of morality and teaches that sex outside marriage is a sin, is involved. And there is also a difference where a politician who legislates in a conservative way in relation to sexual issues and extols family values but behaves differently in his or her private life, is concerned. Cant and hypocrisy of that kind should certainly be exposed in the public interest. Neither David Beckham nor his wife, however, is in any kind of position of assumed authority.
Thus, the publication of the ‘Beckham texts’ may be in the interest of the News Of The World who will doubtless have sold newspapers as a result. It may even be in the interest of Rebecca Loos, or whoever supplied the texts to the newspaper, presumably for money. But it is not in the interest of either journalism or the quality of public life that private matters between David Beckham and any woman he befriends can be treated as public property.

Whatever about David and Victoria Beckham, and their kids and the efffect this may have on their marriage, the episode, in all of its tawdry detail, underlines the extent to which we all need to be careful about texts and emails and mobile phone conversations (where were you at that precise moment, sir?) and other apparently private forms of interaction.
The communications revolution is a wonderful thing – but it does pose new and different threats to our privacy.
To begin with, the good intentions of the person with whom you are exchanging pleasantries, whether of a sexual nature or otherwise, cannot be assumed. And if, as seems to be the case with Rebecca Loos, every text message is kept, capable of being taken down and used in evidence later, then a new and different level of vulnerability has been created.
And what with Google blithely promising that emails sent via their new gmail service will be scanned for keywords that will enable advertisers to target you more directly and effectively, you realise, well fuck it, that nothing is really sacred anymore.
Gird your loins! You have been warned.