It has got many names or rather aspects: spying, eavesdropping, "curi dengar"...and it's considered negative most of the time. This feeling that you need to know everything that's going on or most things keeps making you carry out some weird actions sometimes.
I think there are 2 kinds of spying:
1. The healthy one: mostly constructive, it makes you want to know more about anything or anyone. When it doesn't help anyone, it doesn't hurt any either.
2. The unhealthy one: wanting to spy on people to have fresh material for gossips or spying to expose individual’s weakness.
To say that spying is bad and unhealthy is not altogether correct. What's important about spying or eavesdropping is the intention. What is the purpose of spying? If the act is done to ensure that a person, company, or country can be saves from destruction or war then spying cannot be deemed as unhealthy.
While in other hand, my opinion is differ when it come to eavesdrop in public places, since in a public place people know that others often cannot help but hear what we said sometimes. Eavesdropping is just part of social interaction and people should assume it is happening in public places.
I sometimes listen to conversations around me; I don’t use glass to listen through the wall, I don’t sneak under your table or chairs, and I don’t move closer to you at the train station or in the restaurant so that I can hear your conversation.
One reason I don’t do those things is I don’t have to. To generalize, Malaysian people are loud, so a lot of times people consciously make their conversations public. I am sure most of people have met at least 1 person that talk so loud on the phone in public.
Last time I was traveling with train alone, I have to sit beside a woman around 35 years old, I immediately trying to sleep as the train departs and these women next to me still with his laptop doing his own work. Suddenly, I can’t help myself eavesdropping the woman talking her husband over the phone with furious tone telling her husband that someone had removed her as a facebook friend. She took it very personal, tried to figure out what she had done to upset this person, and was ready to remove the person from her handphone contact. I fought the temptation to say “relex kak, facebook isn’t important, some people just decide to cut down to only a few friends, or maybe she made a mistake.”
But I knew the best thing to do was keep my eyes closed pretending I like I am asleep.
When I listen in to what other people are saying, and by extension thinking, I’m expanding my perspective on the different ways people interpret their surrounding and make sense of the world. Which I think it’s a natural activity on my brain.
There is a lot of innovation that is catered for these behaviors, mostly gadget in the name of army equipment. I didn’t come across any installation or art that related to eavesdropping yet.One of the gadget is Inspector Gadget Audio Listening Device.
For more info on this gadget you can visit
How does “eavesdropping” related to my project...
Eavesdropping is part of curiosity in sound.
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