back to the old school

In a work capacity, I spent about ten years rubbing shoulders with executives from the corporations whose efforts have combined to bring you the connected world in which you now live: mobile operators, broadband service providers, the incumbent wireline telecoms firms of many different countries, digital 'content' developers plus the vendors of all the underlying network infrastructure, billing systems, data clearing houses and so on.

It was with these guys in mind that I wrote the opening stanzas (Does my stuff have 'stanzas' in any meaningful sense? I don't know. Ask someone who knows about 'literature' or 'poetry'. I only read with a view to refreshing my personal schemata, not with the gimlet eye of the technically proficient critic.) of a bit of poesy I put up here some weeks ago.

In that poem you can read the kind of thing I heard on a regular basis at technology conferences: execs extolling the power of their firms' particular variants of the widgets needed to power the connectivity that has affected almost everything most of us do today.

Affected how?

Well, these are some anecdotes of my own:

It's 1988. I'm 'studying' for my A Levels in what was then referred to by its legacy name 'the tech', a further education college in one of this England's small cathedral cities. My girlfriend has a fascinating personality composed of elements including the following: sense of humour very much in sync with my own; good taste in music (from my point of view); healthy sexual appetite (i.e. wants to have sex quite often); a basic goodness/decency; extremely quick to anger; rarely interested in conceding the point that she may have contributed in any way to a misunderstanding. She and I become acquainted in the first place because we are in the same classes for history and English literature. The teacher (styled 'lecturer' because it's an FE college) of the latter arranges for our class to see a performance of Coriolanus (the class clown never stopped laughing at the fact that this name contains the shorter word 'anus'; he also sniggered EVERY time the name of the heroine of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park was read out loud). We are free to make our own travel arrangements, so my girlfriend and I decide it will be much cooler not to travel with the rest of the class. So we arrange to meet on the morning of the appointed day. I stand waiting for her at one of the town's two railway stations for a really long time. She does not arrive. I rack my brains, thinking of whether something I might have said (or not said) or done (or not done) could have induced a fit of anger such that she has decided not to show up. Unable to think of anything this time, I am suddenly gripped by the fear that for the zillionth time we have had a misunderstanding about precisely where to meet. This turns out not to be a baseless fear. I hasten towards the town's bus station, which is nearby. About halfway there, I encounter my girlfriend and her boiling rage. All these years later, I have no idea who fucked up. Either way, one of us thought the plan was to meet at the bus station, the other thought the railway station was the place. It all turned out OK. We had plenty of time to get into London, mooch around a bit and rock up for the play.

This scenario simply couldn't happen today. Mobile phones have mitigated the risks of something like this down to zero, I would have thought.

Similarly, it's now possible to meet someone 'at' a football match - i.e. one can head towards the stadium in which a professional football team plays with a plan to meet friends or family members, having made prior arrangements no more specific than 'I'll text you when I get there'. In that latter utterance, the word 'there' really just means 'the general area around the ground.'

These are example of progress. Mini-miracles, transforming life for the better, even if only in relatively trivial ways. I could, drawing on all those meetings with the people behind the enabling technologies and corporations, flag up examples of far more significant ways in which people's lives have been improved by this communications and data revolution. I can't be bothered, though.

So, I like to be connected and I can even be minded to evangelise a bit about all that sometimes.

There is one form of connectivity, however, from which I have decided to remove myself forever: Facebook.

It seems I'm not alone.

This morning, I noticed that my Twitter account had a couple of new followers, neither of whom are automated spam androids endlessly spewing links to dubious articles about search engine optimisation. One of them seems to be quite an interesting person named Emily. She writes very well and is funny, I think. I have no idea how she knew of the existence of my Twitter account, or if she's followed the link from there to this blog. That's something I quite like about Twitter: chance encounters with completely unknown people who seem like they might be interesting or at least be interested in some of the same things or ideas as oneself. Little emotional investment is required. If the person turns out not to be as stimulating as initially appears to be the case, you can just forget about it. If they do: bonus.

Emily has written a nice piece on her own reasons for quitting Facebook. I found it amusing and everything she says makes sense to me.

I was very familiar with the notion of the person who shares far, far too much information in real time. My most notable example was my wife's stepsister. For several years, I knew: when she was craving an overcomplicated coffee-based drink from Starbucks; when her back ached and how badly; when she had tidied her flat and how long it had taken; when someone had been rude to her in the supermarket and the precise nature of the offence; when she was stuck in traffic; when and where she was going to have a tattoo either added to or removed from her densely illustrated body; etc. etc. et-fucking-cetera.

Emily's point about relatives knowing one's business struck a chord too. Thanks to Facebook, my US-based father-in-law thinks I'm a 'communist' because some of my status updates contained words of criticism about the government the people of this country have been saddled with since last year's election and because he saw pictures I'd taken on the big TUC anti-cuts march a couple of months ago.

Some of my other reasons for disentangling myself from the vile Mark Zuckerberg's strands of the web are a bit different:

• Uncomfortable blending of private and public personae: I am not really the same person when in work mode as I am when in non-work mode. I have learned (albeit more recently that I should have) that it's generally not a good idea to share my real views on politics, society, business, human beings and life in general with my colleagues. It seems a lot of my opinions are a bit non-mainstream and that some people can find some of them a bit unpalatable. It also turns out that this can affect some people's perception of my ability to discharge my professional responsibilities or of my ability to 'fit in'. Facebook blurs the professional/personal distinction that I've taken care to keep rather sharp. This is because of the propensity of current and former colleagues to 'add me on Facebook.' I've even had a case of a former client wanting to 'friend' me. Awkward.
• Seeing the 'real' you: In the case of my wife's stepsister, and, I'm guessing, with people in Emily's network, irritation springs from too much detail about the mundane. Another problem for me was around Facebook spoiling a generally positive impression of people I liked without knowing very well. Often it would be someone I'd worked with for just a few months some time in the past - someone who'd seemed personable, amusing, friendly and reasonable. Thanks to Facebook, people of this sort are transformed into individuals I decide I would probably dislike were I to spend more time with them: the guy who thinks it's alright to dress as a Nazi for a fancy dress party; people who think Boris Johnson is 'a legend'.

So, this is why I quit Facebook and why I'm enjoying writing here and Twittering gaily with no reference to my real name.

Is there a downside? Maybe. Facebook reconnected me with a lot of people I'd not seen since the end of the analogue age. I had some fun reliving my nightclubbing days with some of these people. It also made it a little easier to keep in touch with friends who live in other parts of the world. These benefits, however, were more than outweighed by the bad bits.