The Hands of the World

“You had to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized.” George Orwell.

The internet is a bit scary. Every time you post something online you are potentially leaving yourself open to some random person spewing bile at you, and there seems to be an infinity of people out there that love to do just that. Just the other morning I woke up to a comment on a blog post I wrote nearly three years ago about running a marathon in Manchester. It was 6am on Sunday morning and I received an email notifying me of a comment that read: “You are disgusting, go die” and it made me laugh at first, but then I found myself wondering about the psychological state of someone that spends their time reading what people write online for the express purpose of abusing them. I can’t imagine such people feel very content in themselves and so I found myself feeling a little bit sorry for my anonymous abuser. Admittedly, it was a bit of a daft post, but I enjoy being a bit daft sometimes (You can read it here if you want to). I think the world needs more daftness and I like to think I contribute to it in my own sweet way. I am of such a persuasion that it’s all them others that are daft, not me, especially those that take themselves too seriously. We’re all just temporarily animated bits of dust. The nice clothes you wear are tomorrow’s rags, the car you drive is tomorrow’s scrap, and the house you live in, will, in a few short years, belong to someone else or be knocked to the ground to build something else, so there isn’t much sense in feeling too excited about any of it.

I was instinctively nervous of platforms like Facebook from the first time I logged on, and still am. I regularly think about deleting all of it, but at the same time there are a lot of things I like about it. Through my activities on my Facebook photography page, I have had experiences and made friends with people that never would have happened without it. The idea of “Facebook friends” specifically is a bit of a lie though. I have “friends” on Facebook that I wouldn’t even recognise in the street. Similarly, there are lots of people I talk to regularly that I wouldn’t even think to add as a “friend” on Facebook, and I rarely add people anyway unless maybe they, for some reason, regularly pop up in my “people you may know” section. The way I see it is that interactions with people in the real world are infinitely more valuable than Facebook interactions, which is obviously why politicians and their representative’s go door to door when there are elections on. I’ve seen a few people that had well over 1,000 friends on Facebook and yet were not even able to find someone to go to the cinema with on a Friday night. I personally go to the cinema by myself about 50% of the time, if at all, because I think going to the cinema with someone else is actually a bit pointless when all you’re going to be doing for the two hours is staring at a screen and not talking anyway, but I digress.

Every single thing that you post is there forever, every message you send can be screenshot, every single thing you have ever done can be used against you. Even if you’ve never said a single controversial thing online, there is a possibility that what you say online today could be deemed to be controversial in ten or twenty or thirty years’ time.

I regularly get nasty comments on my various social media pages, and, when I do, the first thing I do is to click on the profile of the person that comments. If it appears that the person is real then I will leave it, but the nastiest comments are invariably from people with profiles that have maybe one or two friends and look like they were setup with the express intention of trolling.

In the modern world, everyone is walking around with mobile weapons in their hands, their fingers on screens as potentially lethal as on triggers of guns, ready to screenshot every thing you post and share it with whoever in WhatsApp messages. It used to be that people could go out to the pub, drink themselves so daft that they couldn’t speak coherently, and feel relatively content that the company they were in were equally inebriated and wouldn’t remember anyway. I expect this is one of the reasons people like those around them to be drunk when they are. But now everyone has little mobile recording devices that could be making videos that go viral without your even realising. One of the last times I had one too many beers in the pub, I was doing some crazy dance to a band with some random American girl and several people were pointing their phones at us, recording everything, and I’ve often wondered if some time that video will come back to haunt me. At the time I didn’t care because I felt I had moves like Jagger or John Travolta, but in the cold, twitchy, hungover light of dawn I felt gripped with terror. But anyway, in the age of social media, chat apps, and mobile recording devices, it doesn’t do to be having “one too many”, and I wonder if, people being aware of such hazards, are less inclined to drink booze as a consequence.

I made the picture at the top of this post a few days ago. Even though I made it, it makes me feel a little uncomfortable to look at, but I think it nicely represents how I sometimes think of using the internet. After all, when you post things online, are you not, potentially, exposing yourself to all of the hands of the world?

:)