Bone State of Play

Privacy is needed in a democracy to give people the right to freedom of thought, and it is needed to give people like Congressman Stephen the ability to do his job without his personal life interfering with his political agenda. For a democracy to flourish it requires a certain amount of independent thinking done by individuals rather than people who live in fear of getting in trouble. In a police state of communist everyone has the same ideas, or they pretend to. In controlled China under Mao people all marched to the same beat with the small red book as their guide to life. The people had no privacy in this strictly controlled state. The people in the United States do not experience this kind of drastic loss of privacy as the Chinese government exercises but the U.S. is slowly drifting to giving up our rights to be different. The way things are advertised on facebook will lead teenagers to all shop at the same “cool” stores that are suggested to them rather than going out and finding new places. This is because our generation is used to being force fed information about what we like or do not like. People have this fear in a community that is constantly under supervision. People no longer have paper trails but a complete trail of their existence on the internet from different sources of credit reports or facebook. McAdams character can find out all the information about Sonia’s personal life just but going on her computer for a while, taking notes and making phone calls. She finds out where Sonia lived, where her roommate lives, that her roommate changed her name, and her social security number. McAdams assumes the researching position at her computer that is all too familiar to many of us.