Transcript of the above video:

So the title of this video or I should say the thumbnail, it's a “foreigners behaving badly”. We have done videos on this before but I put a question mark on this one because, as noted in the title, I'm posing the question, "do we all need to be tracked down in the world we live in now?" What am I talking about here? 

Well I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Pattaya Mail, that is pattayamail.com, the article is titled: Daniel Davies is found but Immigration question marks remain. I urge those who are watching this video go check out that article in detail, a lot of interesting information there. They get into things like doing TM30's, address reporting, stuff that nature, but quoting directly, this is what I want to get to. "To the relief of all, Welsh tourist Daniel Davies, 26, has been found alive and well in a South Thailand hostelry." - I didn't know that was a word - hostelry. I would just say hostel, but whatever - "Immigration Police tracked him down to the Guest House and Hostel on Phi Phi Island, Krabi, as he slept in his bunk bed according to the Daily Mail. He had not been in touch with UK family or friends since March 13 when he was staying in Bangkok. His ongoing silence was apparently due to a dispute with his family." Now I don't want to get into the ins and outs, and this is why there's a question mark. There seems to be some issue; he may have overstayed or whatever. I don't want to get into all of that because we could nitpick all of that. Yeah overstay, you are not supposed to do it; you are supposed to do address reporting, they mentioned some of that. 

The point I am trying to make is and I saw this a few years after I moved to Thailand and it seemed to happen after the onset of smartphones where we saw smartphone usage really be on the upswing here in Thailand and people started coming in and using their smartphones and things, where there was a time and honestly I got here in 2008 and this was still sort of the old era for about another really from my recollection, I don't remember smartphones and tablets being a thing until after the riots in 2010. I don't remember exactly when but sometime in late 2010, early 2011, I started seeing people with like tablets and I started seeing an emails where people said things like "sent from my iPhone" and things of this nature. And around that time, I started seeing some of the more negative implications of the rise of smartphones pop up as a result of the smartphone itself. The point I am trying to make is one of those negative things, you can view it as negative, view it as positive, maybe I should just say it was a development - it has positive characteristics, negative characteristics - but it was the whole notion that "oh somebody came to Thailand and we haven't heard from them in X number of days therefore calling all cars." 

Now if you go through this article, it looks like this person was sort of incommunicado for a number of months and there seems to have been some sort of family dispute involved, whatever, I'm not digging into that. But I remember there was a situation, this is years ago, going on over 10 years ago, where a young lady had come to Thailand and she hadn't been heard from for literally like a couple of days, like two days or something of this nature and her mother was like scouring people in Thailand, contacting people, "where is she, what's going on?" The point I'm trying to make and it may not be completely apropos with regard to this scenario but it's just the whole just general privacy in the world we live in now, especially with regard to travel and the notion that we don't all need to be attached to these digital low jacks called smartphones and if we are not immediately sort of receptive if you will of the communication via these digital low jacks, that we have gone off the reservation or we are lost or there is something that is necessarily bad has happened, and it's part and parcel with this whole lack of the notion of privacy, just basic sort of personal privacy that people have a right to not be found, that they have a right to not necessarily be at everyone's beck and call all the time. Now there are shades of gray to this. I mean again if you read the article, it looks like this person was not found for a number of months; their family was worried about them; that's a little bit of a different scenario. But there is also the extreme in the other way where I have seen scenarios where people, "I haven't heard from somebody in two days. Can anybody find them?" Well they are halfway across the world. There was a time and I was kind of in a way fortunate enough to come to Thailand at the last - and I was in Korea before this - to come to both places and Korea I especially remember this, I had to go get change in Korean coins which were as I recall about the size shape of a Thai 10 baht coin and use a ton of them to be able to call back home and just be like "hey I made it here, I'm okay". But when you came to East Asia from America or the UK or Western Europe or wherever it was known that yeah, that person is not going to be in direct constant communication all the time. 

Now again, not to say that that analysis necessarily applies directly to this situation in this story but again, I think it is worth at least taking a moment and pause and sort of look at ourselves as a society, call it internationally, as to whether or not this is the kind of society we want to live in where we are literally tracked and traced all the time and if even a day or two goes by - again months are a different thing - but a day or two goes by and there has been no communication with somebody, that we say to ourselves, "hey they are half a world away, it might take a minute for them to contact us." Maybe they don't want to be in communication, maybe they want to be left alone. That's the other side of it, and not to dig too deep into that but again, it's this whole notion of privacy and maybe people do want a minute where they are not constantly under the scrutiny of social media highlights, social media just constant presence that maybe folks want to have their own life and they don't necessarily want to constantly be "tracked down" either here in the Kingdom of Thailand or anywhere else.