How - Dov Seidman [21]
These facts exert a profound influence on business. Before transparency allowed them to peer through the tall trees, outside observers could discern the outline of a forest, but thought little about what was growing beneath. Companies, for instance, could form a joint venture to protect themselves from the ramifications of a dubious enterprise, believing that if the unit got into trouble it would not hurt the reputation of the parent company. In a transparent world, however, when your joint venture transgresses, everybody knows who owns it. In the past, training its managers in proper conduct was sufficient to protect a company’s reputation because line employees had little contact with the outside world and rarely got a company into trouble. Now, any employee can say something about a company in a chat room or in a blog and the next day it might appear on DrudgeReport or The Smoking Gun. There’s even a new word for it—whistleblogging—when employees create personal online journals to report company wrongdoing. The new transparency doesn’t allow you to hide in the dark underbrush, to have a joint venture here, or hire an agent there. Observers can easily tell the trees from the forest.
An information society also breeds a surveillance society. People are more curious and they look a lot more. They look because it is suddenly easy to do so; looking costs little, requires even less effort, and pays off with everything from the best prices for goods and services to revelations of the unsavory. Around the world, viewers are glued to their television sets by “reality TV,” programming that purports to give true glimpses of private lives (the United States now has a whole network dedicated to it, and the British version of Celebrity Big Brother touched off an international incident16). We’ve always been interested in what was happening next door, but now we can actually see it. It’s like examining a drop of water under a microscope. When you first place the drop on the slide, it looks clear and pristine. But the microscope’s lens reveals a hidden world. With each adjustment of the magnification you see organisms and objects that before you could only have imagined; what first appeared clear and unpolluted suddenly appears messy and complex. Microscope technology changes the way you look at water, and with your curiosity thus piqued, you can’t help but wonder what worlds might exist within other familiar objects.
People look more often because the looking is easier and there has been more to find. Imagine the gratification of Heather Landy, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram staff writer who uncovered David Edmondson’s embellished RadioShack resume. She began her investigation “into Edmondson’s credentials after learning that the executive, who started two churches before making the