Family tree sprouting new branches.

Last year I got an email from a young gent in Russia. He appears to be part of a branch of our family tree that we had lost track of since my father's family's return from exile to Siberia way back in the early years of the last century. Yesterday, I got an email from a man and his wife in Germany with the same surname as ours. He appears to have a connection with an uncle of mine who was killed in Europe in World War II. In both cases, there are a lot of gaps that we are trying to sort out, but with a surname as unusual as mine there has to be a connection somewhere, even if it isn't exactly where we think it is.

Whenever something like this happens, I can't help but be astounded at the technological marvels we enjoy. The World Wide Web, email, instant messaging, video conferencing, affordable desk-top computers, software to do everything but groom your cat and take your dog for a walk are but a few things that didn't exist just three decades or so ago. These inventions have been a tremendous boon to us all, at least so far as they are being used constructively and productively. There are, of course, many abuses possible with these inventions and there are miscreants everywhere who can't wait to create new ways of fleecing us of our assets or otherwise complicating our lives. Spammers, for instance. Phishers. Virus programmers. Those are just some of the more obvious bozos that we could really do without.

What scares me more is how our governments put these powerful new tools to work. Monitoring and controlling us all is easier than ever. Cameras hooked up to computers are everywhere. Our telephone calls and emails are never safe from being monitored. In Canada, we don't have quite the surveillance-obsessed atmosphere that is rife in the U.S., at least not yet, but when it comes, who is going to fight against it?

We are a world of pussies. We accede to every official demand in the name of security and safety. Balance is gone. We are very much living George Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four, but no-one cares. In fact, ask the teenager in your home if he or she has ever heard of that book. I doubt it.

I love today's technology. I don't always like the way it is being used or the potential it holds to enslave us completely.

Big Brother is Watching

Isn't technology great? In the past hour I have chatted via MSN with my son who is at home with a cold, and via ICQ with a relative in Russia. It wasn't all that many years ago that it would take weeks to send a letter abroad. Now it takes seconds via email. Chat is instantaneous.

Several decades go, I would scribble out something in my horrible handwriting and chances were pretty good that no-one would ever read what I wrote. Maybe that was a good thing. Now I can post to this blog and anyone can read what I write. And I can read what others write in posts to their own blogs. These tremendous changes, in such a short period of time, make me wonder what else will be invented and developed in the years to come.

Will all the things that appear in the years ahead be good for us? I suspect not. The one major fault I find with all of the technological advances is that they make it easy to penetrate any last veneer of privacy. The placing of cookies on our computers by websites wishing to track our preferences and habits is fairly benign, but even that information could be potentially embarrassing to some people. What I fear more is that governments will increasingly use the internet and our emails, chats and general web use as ways to spy on us. After all, the die has been cast, hasn't it? When everything is filtered through the rubric of the 'greater good,' then anything is permissible. Want to catch a drug pusher or a terrorist? Monitor his email, watch the web sites he visits. In order to do so, though, it pretty much requires official licence to spy on everyone else at the same time. That's not good, folks.

I am, believe it or not, a pretty shy person. I am also somewhat reclusive. I am perfectly comfortable among people usually, but given a choice of whether to be on my own or mixing with a bunch of people with whom I have little or nothing in common, I'd rather be by myself. I don't have any big secrets. I'm not ashamed of myself. I just don't think that as a matter of principle everyone needs to know everything about me. I share what I feel like sharing about myself, and expect others to be similarly circumspect. That is not to say that I am not interested in the lives and struggles of others, it just means that I don't want to pry into anything that isn't any of my business.

When I see someone I haven't spoken to for a while, my wife often asks something about them that I don't know. Why don't I know? Because I didn't ask. Why didn't I ask? Because then they would have felt compelled to tell me. I try to respect their privacy.

My attitudes about these things are increasingly considered 'quaint' and 'behind the times.' That may be so. The problem is that once the systems and attitudes about these things make spying commonplace and expected, it will be impossible to wind things back.

So, while I may appreciate the technology and enjoy its benefits, it also scares me just a bit. Big Brother is watching.