Modern Times

All is well this Sunday. The music's on in the living room, the son's just finished some grand creation in the kitchen, and the other half's doing something complicated with paperwork. I'm sitting in the kitchen, looking very business-like, tapping away at the laptop. I've checked my e-mails, done a quick round up of the various forums to which I contribute, and had a look at Facebook.

Since when did this become how I spend a Sunday? I know that I'm behind the times and I understand I have a somewhat warped view of my role in society. In my mind, I'm wearing a gingham apron, I have a dusting of flour on my hands and maybe a touch on my nose, and I've already made 3 jars of jam from the damsons in the garden. I'll be getting ready for a WI meeting this afternoon and gathering up my quilting to show the other ladies. It doesn't really bear very much relation to reality, although there is some flour in the cupboard. Somewhere.

Do you ever stop and wonder how different life is now from the last generation? And how much of our lives revolve around one (or more) of the various social networking platforms? Good heavens, I've even been known to tweet occasionally when the mood takes me.

So much of our lives is now shared with people we barely know, and I include blogging firmly within that. With blogging, we reach out to a whole group of people who may not even share the same interests but have stumbled on us through some quirk of the internet. We become part of online communities, we get virtual friends and we spend hours reading what other people have said. At least however we choose to share with people who may be unknown to us though, unlike Facebook with its privacy rules becoming more confusing than the instructions for setting up a Playstation 3.

Facebook's becoming a bit of an issue for me. I still like it, I've got in touch with people I haven't seen for years and I get to nosey around at what other people are doing. But I'm starting to wonder if it isn't all one big scam. I read an article in the Daily Mail yesterday about Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, internet nerd, and apparently, all round dysfunctional geek. I can well imagine that he uses one of the Facebook applications to count his millions, probably in Pirate pounds or something. He came up with the revolutionary idea of setting up a website where people would reveal all their secrets, their personal details and their photos. If we received an e-mail from a stranger asking us to do just that, his e-mail would have disappeared into the Spam Box and he'd be hounded on Watchdog. Apparently Facebook stores every message we've ever sent, every status update we've ever made, every single one of our personal details. Facebook's virtual spare room must be enormous. Zuckerberg believes he's setting the new social norm, that this will become our new way of staying in touch and receiving information. Do you think one day he'll commit the largest identity theft ever known, steal all our money and take over the world?

I can't help but wonder if we really know what we're doing. Although I do enjoy a game of Scrabble.