9/07/09  Peter Bradwell writes on what we can learn about personal information from Michael Jackson.

If you haven’t heard, Michael Jackson, a popular music performer, has died.

If you had, you may have noticed that there is already a raging battle over his memory. His family and friends are unwavering in their commitment to the story of a musical genius beset by the nightmare of acute fame. Others seek the half-truths and rumours that pad out the long-standing Wacko Jacko narrative.

This struggle to define who he was is a useful analogue of some of the problems we all face managing a world in which more people know more about us than ever. We seem to have more control over how we are seen and understood. But at the same time, other people and organisations have more opportunity to make decisions, without our involvement, about who we are. That’s a real problem in a world of individually tailored services - when the kind of services, products, and interactions we encounter are dependent on who people think we are.

As Michael Jackson’s fame rose, his image was an integral part of his success. Everyone wanted a glimpse of who he was. He was willing to try to satisfy that curiosity. Through his music, his videos and, increasingly, through his stage-managed appearances and behaviour, he managed to stay in control in the early days of how he was perceived, how his life and music and status was reflected across popular culture. It gave him tremendous opportunities to use the way people saw him for his own advantage – creatively and commercially.

But it was a dangerous game. His extreme fame brought an extreme interest in his life. There was a healthy supply of stories, informants and commentators willing to meet that demand. There grew a side story of intrigue into his personal behaviour and his eccentricities. For a while this was something Jackson was keen to exploit. But it came back to bite him. 

The question ‘who is Michael Jackson’ became an increasingly difficult question to answer. The more we knew, the less sure we were. Ultimately he lost control.  In the mix of his shyness, the performance, the image control and ultimate identity crisis and implosion is a story with lessons for the more everyday fame we all have to deal with.

We all have to deal now with more people knowing more about us than ever before. And whilst this seems, excitingly, to give us scope to take control of how people see us; it means other people have the opportunity to define who we are too. That’s the tension that our work on privacy and personal information looks to address. It’s something that is driving our new ‘People’s Inquiry’ into personal information, where we will be asking people how they think their personal information should be used. 

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