Privacy and Pole Vaulters
Everyone, so the adage goes, will have fifteen minutes of fame. But because of the Internet, you may become famous without even knowing about it and without your consent. Take the case of Allison Stokke, an attractive, 18-year-old, pole vaulter from California:
In her high school track and field career, Stokke had won a 2004 California state pole vaulting title, broken five national records and earned a scholarship to the University of California, yet only track devotees had noticed. Then, in early May, she received e-mails from friends who warned that a year-old picture of Stokke idly adjusting her hair at a track meet in New York had been plastered across the Internet. She had more than 1,000 new messages on her MySpace page. A three-minute video of Stokke standing against a wall and analyzing her performance at another meet had been posted on YouTube and viewed 150,000 times…
The wave of attention has steamrolled Stokke and her family in Newport Beach, Calif. She is recognized — and stared at — in coffee shops. She locks her doors and tries not to leave the house alone. Her father, Allan Stokke, comes home from his job as a lawyer and searches the Internet. He reads message boards and tries to pick out potential stalkers.
“We’re keeping a watchful eye,” Allan Stokke said. “We have to be smart and deal with it the best we can. It’s not something that you can just make go away.”
Unfortunately, there’s little that anyone can do in a situation like this. As all journalists and photographers know, anyone in public is legally fair game for photos. (See my prior post on camera phones.) If a person is walking down the street, you can take any pictures of him you want. And the plethora of detailed information on the Internet is making it increasingly easy to find personal information about people. The speed of communication allows one to become famous — or infamous — that much more quickly.
The law has not caught up with technology, and I’m not sure whether it will — or should. There are free speech issues as well. People may just have to get used to having less privacy. Stokke will not be the last person to deal with a situation like this. (Normally, I would include a photo of the public figure about whom I’m writing, but in this case I don’t want to encourage such behavior since Stokke and her family seem fairly upset.)
But there is one benefit to society from such technological abilities: People may be less likely to act unethically, immorally or illegally if it is much easier to document and communicate that behavior. Still, do we want to live in a world without a reasonable expectation of privacy?
Earlier: The Internet is one of the reasons that we’re living in a hypersexualized society (and the fanfare surrounding Stokke is just one more example). But is the Internet a cause, a symptom or a reflection?
29 May 2007 at 4:33 pm
Okay. I’ll bite. I find it VERY curious and ironic that this story made it to the WP in light of the concerns of the young lady and her family. I certainly never heard of the girl until tonight. Hard not to think her profile will blow up after this article.
It’s an interesting story to me but not for any of the reasons inherent in the point of view of the piece. I’m a photographer. One of the things I shoot is women’s collegiate and pro sports. I’m also an unabashed and very seasoned aesthete when it comes to feminine beauty and the female form.
So out of curiousity I followed the links in the piece and also Googled the young lady. I’ve seen dozens of images of her and watched about a three minute interview with her on You Tube at what would be called in the film industry a medium close up.
She is a VERY cute girl. Beautiful? Of course. Very beautiful? Okay. HOW very beautiful? Let’s talk about that and even put it in some context. (It’s only my favorite subject on Earth.)
As I said, I’ve looked at all the images I could quickly find online and there were quite a few. My opinion is that the image mentioned in the WP piece, the one that has made this girl famous, the one featured here on the blog home page for this article, is a VERY flattering picture of this young lady.
I’m a photographer. Flattering pictures happen. BUT… if someone were to tell me the likeness of this girl in the image had been tweaked in Photoshop to enhance her beauty by minimizing her jaw or by some other technique that I use all the time… I certainly would not be surprised.
That’s because the image in question is SO flattering that if you’d shown me all the other images of Allison first and then that image, I honestly might not recognize her as the same person. For me, as a not so casual judge of female beauty, I have to look at the WHOLE of the images I’ve seen of this person and consider the single ultra-striking image as just one of many clues as to what she really looks like.
So it’s in that context that I form my opinion that this one image is unusually flattering.
She is an absolute VISION in that image. Otherworldly. But she’s a mere mortal, albeit a lovely one, in the other images and especially in the video on You Tube.
All in all it’s very easy to see why she’d become an internet phenom. She’s a champion athlete with a wicked body and an image that’s in circulation online that makes her look like an absolute goddess.
The idea that her father, a lawyer, is patrolling the internet trying to identify potential stalkers recalls for me some of the goofy lawyers I’ve had the bad fortune to know. Pretty scary, dad. The online world is not reality. The distances and numbers are so vast as to make monitoring it with an eye out for actual danger ludicrous behavior. Better to keep tabs on your flesh and blood daughter and keep your EARS open for something unusual than to worry about what’s happening on the bloody internet.
The online fuss will run its course. But I have some excellent advice for this young lady and her family should her fame as a babe become a problem in her offline life.
Persue a life and future in the Los Angeles Basin. Anywhere on the Westside will do just fine. Unless the young lady goes to and from work at an ungodly hour AND also works in some isolated environment, one aspect of her daily existence in LA will be seeing anywhere from scores to HUNDREDS of women every single day who are MORE beautiful than she is.
And I hate to be the one to say this, but it won’t even be close.
30 May 2007 at 1:57 pm
As one whose opinion has changed on privacy, I have this to add:
Our current standards of privacy are really a post-industrial phenomenon. If we like living in the “global village” that the Internet, TV, etc. provide, then we are going to have to get used to village life as it was (and is) throughout history, only with a much larger population. It won’t just be the bar “where everybody knows your name”; it’ll be the grocery store, church, the movie theater, the street. And, it won’t be just your name, but all your business, dirty laundry and clean.
29 April 2008 at 6:34 pm
[...] is not even the person’s fault: Allison Stokke, a high-school pole vaulter, became an overnight sensation after photos of her were placed [...]