Eavesdropping has a bad name. It is a form of human communication in which the information gained is stolen, and where such words as cheating and spying come into play. But eavesdropping may also be an attempt to understand what goes on in the lives of others so as to know better how to live one’s own. John L. Locke’s entertaining and disturbing new book, Eavesdropping: An Intimate History, explores everything from sixteenth-century voyeurism to Facebook and Twitter. Below is a short excerpt from the book’s prologue, explaining why he finds eavesdropping so fascinating.
On a flight from Milan to London I was slumped down in my aisle seat, deep in thought as I reviewed an early draft of the manuscript that has become this book. Unbeknownst to me, I was being watched by a woman in the middle seat of the row immediately in front. After we had landed and the passengers were commencing the customary disembarking ritual, the woman startled me by looking over her headrest and pointedly asking if I was writing a book. I answered that I was. What’s it about, she asked. I said my book concerned the intense desire of members of our species to know what is going on in the personal lives of others. At this, the woman burst into ironic laughter since first in watching, and then in asking, she had just expressed two different forms of that very desire.
Watching and asking produce a form of intimate experience, which can be enjoyable in its own right, as well as intimate images, which may be re-experienced when privately brought to mind or – as information – shared with others. Intimacies tend to circulate preferentially among people who know and trust each other, and they usually move swiftly. Since many of these “secrets” ultimately become public knowledge, a look at how intimate material travels enables us to understand the social foundations of scandal, rough justice, and the “news,” even “history.”
I smiled in response to the lady on the plane but I could just as well have laughed, too, for here I was, writing a book about a subject on which there was little in the way of directly relevant research. Indeed, until I began to study eavesdropping – one of the more important ways that ordinary people express the desire at issue – I had never, in many years of research, encountered a behavior whose actual significance was so greatly at variance with its recognized importance. Look for books on social behavior with the word “eavesdropping” in the index section and you are likely to be severely disappointed. Enter the same word in computerized literature searches and your screen will display a list of books on wiretapping and other forms of electronic surveillance. But the word was coined centuries before telephones and recording equipment were invented, and the practice of eavesdropping documented nearly a thousand years earlier, when people were happy to entrust to unaided senses the question of who was doing what to whom.
Just after I began my studies of eavesdropping, a colleague asked me why I had chosen to address this particular subject. It must have seemed a radical departure from my previous work on the psychology of language. I told him that I had come across Marjorie McIntosh’s analysis of court records indicating that five and six centuries ago, English citizens had, in impressive numbers, been arrested for eavesdropping. I wondered what, in the medieval mind, would have caused this behavior to be criminalized, and what the “criminals” themselves were doing, or thought they were doing, when they went out at night and listened to their neighbors’ conversations.
I had also begun to study ethology, a field that deals with behavior in a broad range of species, and had encountered the work of Peter McGregor. He pointed out that birds increase their chances of survival by monitoring the long-distance calls of other bir