Thursday, May 24, 2012

By Doug Cabral
Published: April 16, 2009

This may be hard to follow, but bear with me. My sister-in-law has friended my younger daughter on Facebook. Incidentally, the MSWord program I am using to write this has underlined the word friended in red. That is to tell me, stupid, that friended is not a word, or at least not a word that the world's most widely used word processing program - a program replete with hundreds of features and shortcuts that I haven't used in 10 years of writing this weekly column, a program marketed by the world's indisputable software ogre, at least until Google happened - recognizes.

But, I know better. I know that friended is a verb created by someone in the Facebook galaxy to describe the process by which I, or someone, asks to be a licensed visitor to your, or anyone's, Facebook page, and you, probably without intensive scrutiny, agree. I'm someone who is fundamentally opposed to strong-arming words into serving writers and speakers in ways the poor things never volunteered for, but I am without leverage in the debate. Neither have I been allowed to become a friended member of my younger daughter's Facebook circle.

So, anyhow, on Monday, my sister-in-law discovered a congratulatory note on Alix's wall (oh, by the way, there is no wall, really, but don't be distracted). The note said something to the effect of, So, now you're Aunt Alix. I don't know exactly what the posting (on the non-wall wall) said, because, as I explained, I have not been granted friended status. (By the way, I know I'm in imminent danger of losing the thread here.) But, back to the point, which is that my sister-in-law, putting one and one together came to the conclusions that a) my older daughter Emily had produced her first child, my first grandchild, which is correct - a granddaughter whose name is Isabella; and b) that Isabella had happened upon us some time ago, and that I, in my doltish way, had neglected to tell her, which is wrong. Isabella had arrived no more than an hour or two earlier in the day - mother, daughter, and father doing fine. But this is not a birth announcement. It's about the fetter-free flow of information and the implications for mankind, and especially grandfather-kind.

Information zips and whirls these days, Facebooking, MySpace-ing, SMS-ing, chat-ing, Yelp-ing, Blackberry-ing, and now Twittering around the globe. Good info, bad info, meaningful or meaningless, crucial or clutter, information, misinformation, even secrets arrest eyeballs and penetrate inner ears indiscriminately. Some of it is information about you, some information you worked very hard to develop, some that may be private. And, who doesn't want to protect his privacy and his info? We're all concerned about protecting our stuff. At every intersection with life itself, we expect to be mugged for our precious secrets, or innocuous info. Who will the mugger be? Even if it isn't meant to be a secret, even if it is meant to be sung in the town square by the town crier, or the new grandfather, and published in the newspapers (a quaint notion, I realize), it means something to somebody.

Protecting one's own stuff is not only a profound worry, it's an industry. In Australia, there's an Office of the Privacy Commissioner, whose job is to collect vast quantities of information about Australians worried about threats to their privacy, but not to make any of the information available. The University of Denver sponsors something called the Privacy Foundation - I've mentioned it before - which rather chillingly defines civilization as "the progress toward a society of privacy." A society like that sounds lonely to me. I mean, don't you have to give a little - information, I mean - to get a little - social interaction. I think you do, but it should be my choice, shouldn't it?

Should you worry about keeping hold of your information, let alone your secrets? Really, the better question is, Do you have any secrets or any information of your own left?

The National Security Agency may invade your privacy - if you are chatting up a terrorist, that is. Congress promises to safeguard your information, all your information, that is, except your address, phone number, party registration, and precinct, so they can target you for fundraising appeals and robo-calls from your party's candidate. Your alma mater keeps track of your giving. Their next appeal will offer you the chance to break into the Tin Circle level in the annual endowment appeal. Never mind, you are reminded, that most of your Class of 1967 mates are donors at the Gold Circle level. The Social Security Administration is keeping track of what you earn. They'll tell you about it from time to time - in 1959, for instance, you earned $653, though you have no idea doing what for whom? No need to worry, somewhere in a dusty archive that is now being scanned and digitized, the information rests, eternally undead.

Don't even talk about what the IRS is keeping track of, although the IRS is a know-nothing government snoop compared to Google, which knows everything you don't want anyone to know.

In the world today, it's a fact that if your information is ever digitally captured, it will be stored forever, and it may be sprung on you at any time. Personal information is digitally captured every time you swipe a credit card, get your passport scanned, check out stuff at the market or Costco's, or wherever, or buy online or from a catalogue, or apply for credit, or answer a telephone poll, or send in your census form, and on and on. When you leave your youthful, silly, unformed life behind, all the personal information that's been collected on you is stored forever. You thought, you hoped, it had been lost forever, but no.

So, who will the mugger be? Got a mirror handy? There's the culprit.