THE past few days have seen this newspaper's sports editor become an instant celebrity in our office. The reason is his appearance on Google Street View, the internet sensation that now captures life on 22,639 miles of streets in 25 British cities, including Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Dundee.
There he is, sat on a bench in his favourite lunchtime spot in Holyrood Road opposite the office, enjoying the sunshine, munching a sandwich, sipping a takeaway coffee and reading the paper. His kids are delighted and I think he's secretly enjoying h
is new-found fame – if only Google hadn't so perfectly captured his bald spot.
For anyone whose workplace didn't grind to a halt last week as everyone Googled their own home as well as those of their colleagues and ex-girlfriends, a word of explanation is perhaps necessary. Google Street View provides an interactive 360° picture of almost every street in 100 cities across the world. Recognition software blurs most faces and car registration plates, but it's not too hard to spot people you know going about their daily business. One colleague here at Scotland on Sunday noted with a certain grim pleasure how someone in his street had put out a blue recycling box on a red box day. Tsk, tsk. Another called up an image of his neighbourhood's dodgy massage parlour (he insists he wasn't checking he'd been caught coming out of it.)
I say "almost" every street, because mine is missing. The Google camera-car inexplicably sailed right past the wee crescent where I live in the Canonmills area of Edinburgh. I suppose I should be glad the world has been spared the sight of my unpainted garden gate or the unruly hedge that was the subject of a stern letter from the council last year. Or, through the unwashed living room window, the yellowing pile of old newspapers on the table that gets so totteringly high it threatens to take out the next person that walks past it. More alarmingly, Google could easily have captured the view through my 15-year-old son's bedroom window, which faces the street (his curtains are seldom drawn). Now that would've been an internet sensation.
I admit I'm a bit disappointed my street isn't part of the fun. I don't agree with the predictable huffing and puffing that we've seen in recent days from commentators complaining that Street View is an abominable infringement of our civil liberties. Simon Davies of Privacy International (I wonder if their office phone number is ex-directory?) was quoted as saying: "We're concerned about cases where a person is captured in a seemingly compromising position. Maybe you've told your wife you're not a smoker – and then she spots you on Street View walking down the road having a cigarette." The right to a fly fag is, it seems, the new cornerstone of our human rights.
This ignores the obvious cultural significance of Street View. At a stroke Google has produced the most extraordinary work of art of the 21st century so far. I've no doubt it'll come to be seen as a landmark moment in social history. I've always loved those TV programmes that tried to provide a snapshot of ordinary life in Britain at a particular time. Street View achieves that on a previously unimaginable scale.
Critics call Street View "voyeuristic". They mean this as a criticism. But who isn't voyeuristic? Okay, I'm a journalist so I have a professional interest in observing the world and its inhabitants. But surely it's a fundamental human instinct to be interested in the lives of others, be they strangers or familiars. True, one man's curiosity is another's nosiness, just as one man's empathy is another's unhealthy interest. But who among us really lives a life staring straight ahead and not taking pleasure in the tics and quirks of the humanity around us?
What makes Street View such a great work of art is its artlessness. Google's camera does not judge. It does not select. It does not preach. It merely shows the world as it is, with a cool neutrality. It's whatever we want to make of it, and therein lies its magic. For many people the appeal will be to explore their own personal terrain – revisiting the location of a first kiss; the home of a long-gone grandparent; a childhood holiday destination. For others this is nothing less than a window on the world.
In Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird, Atticus tells young Scout she will only understand the world if she can imagine herself in someone else's skin. We have long been able to do this by using art, literature, cinema and the imagination. But new technology opens up wonderful new possibilities to experience the richness of the planet and the people on it.
Now, thanks to Street View, we can stand on a street corner in Tokyo, in Florence, in New York or in Scunthorpe and simply have a gander at what's going on around us. We can go wandering, people-watching at our own pace. And through micro-blogging sites like Twitter we can find out what's on the minds of the people who live there. In his book on how 21st-century technology lets us create our own social structures and not have them imposed upon us, the sociologist Clay Shirky borrows a line from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. It sums up the opportunities opened up by innovations such as Facebook, Twitter and now Street View. It truly is a slogan for our times: Here Comes Everybody.
