I promise this will be my last Royal Wedding reflection. But here’s the question: Is it ethically acceptable to lipread when two people are having a private conversation? Of course lipreading, in itself, is not wrong – any more than reading a text or listening to someone’s voice. But for the Royal Wedding last weekend, every newspaper and TV station seemed to employ a professional lipreader to ‘listen in’ to the private conversations of the protagonists; but no-one seemed to question the ethics of this.
If someone has a private conversation, even in a public place, do they still have a right to privacy? What’s the difference between lipreading a private conversation and listening in on a phone call? Why, in other words, are we outraged when a national newspaper admits that it has been tapping the phones of famous people, but not when the world’s media decides to ‘listen in’ on these intimate private conversations?
Is it because they take place on the public stage, so the rules of privacy don’t apply? Is it because these people know about the possibility of being ‘heard’, so they are implicitly recognising that their actions are available for public consumption? Is it because the distinction between public and private does not exist anymore? Is it because ordinary life has become a Big Brother studio, and we all accept as part of the ‘social contract’ that every word we speak might be picked up by a hidden microphone?
Don’t worry – I’m not pretending to be outraged myself. I’m just curious about where the ethical line is: What’s public? What’s private? And why is it that we are quite happy for some private truths to be exposed to public scrutiny but not others?
Holly Watt reports on some of the great lines (and here I am, happy to repeat them…):
“You look beautiful,” he told Kate Middleton, as she walked towards him in her Alexander McQueen dress.
“Yes, it looks fantastic, it’s beautiful,” he added, according to Ruth Press, who has been deaf since birth and works as a forensic lipreader.
Prince William also cracked a joke to his father-in-law at the altar before the royal wedding ceremony, saying: “We’re supposed to have just a small family affair”.
The joke by William to Michael Middleton in Westminster Abbey was spotted by Tina Lannin, lipreader for O’Malley Communications.
She also spotted Prince Harry nervously comment ”Right, she is here now”, as Miss Middleton arrived at the abbey.
And Charlie Swinbourne writes about his experience as a lip-reader, and the fallibility of the process:
Reading lip patterns is vital in helping deaf people fill in the words they can’t hear. I’m partially deaf, and I’ve been lipreading ever since I learned to speak. As well as being a vital part of communication, it’s also fun. I’ve lipread couples bickering in restaurants, footballers telling referees exactly what they think of them, and on Friday, the royal wedding.
During a national event at which the protagonists were visible but crucially not audible, hundreds of deaf people, including my partner and I, added our translations to Twitter in real time. We soon found out that several deaf friends of ours had thought ahead and were actually getting paid for it; working for national news outlets, one working for a series of tabloids and another, for a 24-hour news channel and a magazine.
What was funny was just how often the translations differed from each other. For instance, did William tell Kate at the altar “You look – er, you are beautiful“, or did he say: “You look lovely?”Or, as we thought, did he say: “You look stunning, by the way. Very beautiful.” Then there was the Telegraph, which initially reported William as saying: “You look stunning babe!’
The differences in translation proved that lipreading, far from being some kind of super-power deaf people have (and a great gimmick in movies featuring deaf characters), depends heavily – it’s said 70%-90% – on guesswork. I recently visited a lipreading class to test out my skills, and found that even with a lifetime’s worth of experience, there were still words I struggled to make out.
Bridges and Tangents 
You ask what’s the difference between lipreading and listening in on a phone call? One difference, of course, is that with phone calls some of us have no choice! Mobile phones seem to have caused some people to treat public spaces as an extension of their living rooms. We’ve all sat on buses or trains with someone bellowing intimate details into their phone – and into everyone else’s ears! Do they believe they’re having a private conversation? How would they feel if fellow-passengers started chipping in?
As you’ve suggested, there seems to be, in our society, a general blurring of what is public v what is private. So if your daily commute includes overhearing the young man next to you tell his girlfriend she looked great last night, why would you worry about “overhearing” William saying the same to Kate?
An interesting question – I hope an anthropologist reads your post and comments!
Some years ago I worked in a bank with a deaf girl on my team. The boss worked in an office with three glass walls and my deaf clerk used to come and volunteer gossip about what had been said in that office.
Well lip-reading is a lot less intrusive than the media bugging people’s phones and hacking their computers for a by-line ! Most deaf who lip-read follow strict protocol and consider it not done to ‘listen in’ to other people’s conversation. Most of the public lip-reading done is by HEARING people who teach it. Don’t blame deaf people who ignorant hearing people’s nosiness…
I agree – it’s certainly not about blaming anyone or any group. The protocols of ‘listening in’ or not are fascinating, especially on a crowded bus…