As the latest installment in the revelations of western governments' ability to strip mine our private lives hits the news-stands (never mind, it will all be ploughed in and grassed over in 1 month / 3 months / 6 months / 5 years) the furniture designer-makers discussion forum is once again asking whether social media, Facebook, Twitter, Printerest and their like, are a good thing for us to be exploiting professionally (or is it commercially?). Can they make us rich and famous, when all else has failed?
Beyond a strand of reluctance to get involved and a sense of scepticism, the general feeling seems to be that if it is there and it's free - and it's new - one ought to use it. It used to be said it's not what you know that counts, but who you know. Now, apparently, it's how many you know. 'Counting' is no longer analogue - it's all become digital.
Though the saviour of one's soul may log onto one's social media page, it all seems part of the spread of largely redundant and superficial connectedness that now increasingly defines our society. The trouble is, it needs a National Security Agency to make sense of it.
Nobody on our forum seems to make the connection. I don't mean that if we put up our latest creations on Facebook we should fear a visit from men with baseball caps and name tags: just that from time to time one has to take a look at one's inner being.
Incidentally, I wonder if others have been struck as I have by the contrasting appearance of Bradley Manning, done up to the nines, almost like a Ruritanian general if not quite up to North Korean standards, and the butch and scruffy sub-fusc of his minders - no medals for them - who look like something from the mafia or from Blackwater. Perhaps they are. There is a learned article to be written on the semiotics here, but the essential message is that Bradley Manning has subverted the full panoply of the American state, with which he was trusted, but the government has Bruce Willis on the case and all will be well. An even larger treatise might be written, considering how it is that the United States population can buy into wholesale the evil characterisation of its government agencies depicted in such movies as The Bourne Inheritance and yet still side with the real-life versions of the bad guys. Perhaps it's all down to the skills of central casting - or perhaps things are changing.
Of course the NSA and its likes know that counting is, like taxes, for little people. We may watch anxiously the numbers of our visits or supporters or followers, but they, heck, want it all. They know that after the collecting comes the connecting. As one of them said, how can we connect the dots if we don't have the dots? In other words, how can we explain (to the judge or whomever) why we want it before we have it?
Unfortunately their idea of connection is little more sophisticated than the way in which the caveman's club connected with the woolly mammoth. So, pacé our good and reassuring Malcolm Rifkind, although we indeed should not fear that the analysts are listening in to our fireside chats with our grannies, we should fear that if we innocently acquired enough dots, or spots, like that poor Algerian airline pilot who shared some unfortunate spots just after the demolition of the twin towers and was held for months in high security without there being any actual evidence against him, someone will be connecting for us.
He added: "If you had the impression we are reading millions of emails, we are not. There is no intention in this whole programme to use it for looking at UK domestic traffic – British people talking to each other." The source said analysts used four criteria for determining what was examined: security, terror, organised crime and Britain's economic wellbeing."The vast majority of the data is discarded without being looked at ... we simply don't have the resources."
