Sometimes it definitely feels like globalization had taken over and with the rapidly increasing urbanization people stopped caring about other humans. Everything seems to take a virtual turn, social media is getting more and more popular than social activities. To make things a little bit awkward here with an overly exaggerated example... Have you ever thought about what would happen if you would collapse on the street or your purse would get stolen on public transportation? Would people around you call an ambulance or the police, or would they just walk past you thinking someone else would help eventually?

Now that I've just said that - let's dive in why it still feels like observant people are all over the place taking note of everything you say and do. When you would expect them to pay attention the least, actually they do.

For example the other day I was having a conversation with an old lady, who was mentioning how her neighbours must have had a lot of money to spend because the delivery guy was coming to their house every second day (meaning regularly, I wouldn't take something like this literally by any means.) But while I was listening to her, my mind was picturing not her neighbours being rich, but her standing on a small chair infront of a window with a binocular in hand watching her neighbours 24/7. All I could think of was this: What an observant person. And also from that point on I was also being very cautious not to place too many online orders.

On the other hand have you ever had the experience of catching the eye of a person sitting next to you on the train sneaking a peek on what you're reading or watching on your phone? Or feeling like all eyes are on you when you listen to your music due to your earphones being a little bit too loud? Though this accidental sharing of this beautiful musical experience with everyone else on the metro might not be the epithome of peeking. But listening in on others' private phone calls might count as one. Well, public transportation is a public place and curious eyes and ears are everywhere.

And what about the front desk at your workplace? If you would think receptionists don't take notice if you're a few minutes late then you're totally mistaken. And also they know about each and every time you leave the office earlier. They might not say anything about it (seemingly not having a clue), but in reality they keep records of your lunch breaks, smoke breaks and your longer conversations with colleagues at the water machine. And how do I know that? Well, office gossip can spread fast and it happened to me many times that I was listening to them talking about others' behavior at work.

No matter how much we distance ourselves from the sea of people we are surrounded by in our daily life, we as a part of modern society had learnt to become secretly observant - mastering the art of silently keeping records. You can never know whether the cashier at the supermarket has any thoughts about the items you buy, or whether you cause a good time with your strange purchases for the warehouse guy who puts together and packs up your online order. They will handle all issues with a distant indifference and secrecy as a part of their job - but it doesn't mean they can't see what's infront of them. Altough they might just not care in the end.

Why was I bringing up this topic anyways? Because recently I have heard of a lot of relatively similar cases in which observant people were doing some digging online to unravel some mysteries, or at least things that would have just been burried for good.

One of the cases involved a yet-unpublished young author who had a deal with a publishing house. Apparently she had created several fake accounts on a book reviewing site to trash-review fellow young authors' books and to leave five star reviews for her yet unpublished book - which to be honest seemed suspicious for many observant review reader. They were tracking back all the connecting negative and unrealistically one-sided reviews and unwrapped the case. In the end the author had admitted to her wrongdoings and lost the contract with the publishing house.

Another story involved a Hungarian singer and her divorce scandal back in the summer. Originally she was only posting about peacefully separating from her husband and moving on with her life. And she and her husband were posting the very same text on their social media profile except for one little difference in the wording - which again to be honest seemed suspicious for many observant followers. Especially because the added "one-line comment" contained a word that was not particularly flowing naturally in the Hungarian language.

So it didn't necessarily need a lot of investigation to figure out that the extra word was referring to a dancing group the singer was currently working together with on her tours. To explain it a little bit better, the husband's added one-liner was something along these lines: "From time to time, life has some strange surprises and unpleasant frisks in store." And the name of the dancing group consisting of four male performers could be translated to "frisks" in English. So in a nutshell people were suspecting that one of the dancers had to do something with the divorce, but no one could have known anything for certain.

But the comment of the husband that had started out like a weak reference gradually became the base of a "past social-media-history fact checking"activity of many fellow observers. They had dug up a then recently uploaded photo of the four dancers with all the comments on it. One of the comments was written by the singer herself and it was only four heart emojis - one heart emoji for each dancer. It could have been just an innocent comment on her part, if it would have been just four plain heart emojis. But it wasn't. To be more precise it was three white heart emojis and a red one. And the fellow observers came to the conclusion that the red heart emoji was belonging to the reason behind the divorce. A few months after all the guesswork taking place it had turned out that they might have been completely right.

Secret observation and tracing back information online is part of our modern life. It has its advantages and disadvantages as well. It's more difficult to get away with lies and at the same time the past can haunt us for ever.