Keeping an eye on the key facts of life

My COUSINS in Texas are building a pool in their back garden. Albeit in Texas the portion of private land behind one’s property is called a yard, but that is to digress. Well, bully for them, I think, with only a tinge of bitterness as I read their latest news via an update on Facebook as I walk along the street, wind whipping my hair into not too bad a likeness of Medusa.

The trivia is relentless, yet I check for updates from my “friends” several times a day thanks to the proximity of my constant companion, my smart phone. I log into FB while I’m on the bus, in the loo, or waiting for the Man in My Life to come back from buying his round at the bar. And if I have caught up with those updates and still have time on my hands, I check Twitter, and then Hotmail. Then, if I have exhausted these, I read the newspaper “apps”, particularly the gossipy ones with pictures of celebs who are either too fat or too skinny, or agony aunts.

When I run out of these and still have time stretching ahead of me, I actually feel an edge of desperation creeping up on me, as if the idea of completing my bus journey is unthinkable without the soft-back lighting that illuminates the news that Tricia in Perth has yet another flu virus. Really, that woman should go for some blood tests, or take a holiday.

I don’t know how it has come to this, this frantic consumption of tiny tidbits of information about family, friends, colleagues and people I met once at the bar or at a party that I thought were quite nice and seemed to get on with. I once agreed with that old chestnut from the gnat of Athens that an unexamined life was not worth living. But the constant distraction of updates and tweets and links to funny videos on YouTube is hardly conducive to contemplation of my soul.

Nor are these mesmerising technologies completely benign. Not too long ago, people considered their privacy worth defending and civil liberties groups campaigned against CCTV on the streets because it was a little too much like being constantly watched by Big Brother. But now, if a website or a social networking platform asks people to fill out some information, people are unquestioningly registering personal details like their date of birth, their address, their current employer, the names of their children and with whom they are sleeping.

And rather than handing this information to something like a democratically elected government, it is being handed over to the likes of Facebook’s geeky founder, Mark Zuckerberg, and unknown investors fronted by bankers at Goldman Sachs and Russian venture capitalist Yuri Milner.

What will they do with the pictures you just uploaded of your holiday or your newborn? Who knows. That will be decided when the lucrative possibilities of flogging your personal details meets the ever-changing mirage of loosely defined privacy settings.

I am also uneasy about the ease with which these apps on my smart phone have become so essential. I no longer need to bring a map because the co-location function on the phone places me with a little blue dot on a depiction of the surrounding geography wherever I am in the world. And when I stop to think about this device, it reminds me of watching Star Trek as a child, where Spock and Uhura could just tap their chest and their little communicators would connect them, no matter how tough getting a signal should have been.

But as I look at this line of information, his wife Kristen interrupts the flow of news about the operations in the back garden. The wildfires plaguing Texas that I have heard about in international bulletins is actually within half a mile of their house. Jim and Kristen and their two daughters were evacuated, but later discover that their house was spared, and they have since been able to return home.

And suddenly I am grateful I have some news from my friends, and am pleased to know they are planning to have a pool party to celebrate their good fortune.