There has always been a 'Facebook'

I read another article yesterday about how the world is going to h-e-double-toothpicks because of Facebook. Facebook, the writer implied, is slowly sapping today's youth of the ability to think critically, maintain a modicum of decorum, and tell the difference between good writing and terrible.

It's doing the same thing to old people, but at a slower pace and we're a lost cause anyway; best to focus on the youth. They're the ones who must finish the job we started, that of mucking up the planet and getting aged Hollywood actors elected to high governmental office.

At any rate, aside from all that other stuff, the writer's main concern was privacy, or rather the lack of it. Facebook, he said, is filled with posts containing information most people should probably keep to themselves; everything from personal banking information to the addresses of teenage daughters.

He also complained briefly about the sort of people who leave posts like, "Just had roast beef for supper! Yum, yum!" but we all complain about that. Well, everybody but the roast beef posters. You know who you are.

The point is (I'm sure there was one here somewhere) every article I read comes at the issue as if this is a new phenomenon, something intrinsically tied to the 21st Century, high-speed wifi and computerized data collection techniques. It's not. The problem is as old as communication itself.

From the moment a caveman first slapped two rocks together to warn his buddy on the other side of the valley about the presence of a nearby sabertooth tiger, somebody has been listening in.

When I was a kid, just shortly after the above-mentioned Paleolithic epoch, the most modern device in any American home, aside from the television, was the telephone. It was big, black, rotary-dialed, built like a tank and almost as attractive. Not everyone in the neighborhood had one; they were still considered by some to be a pricey luxury.

The neighbors who didn't have a phone would frequently borrow the phone of a neighbor who did; in these cases, privacy was neither expected nor granted.

My family's phone was serviced by something called a "party line," the Facebook of its day. The phrase party line was entirely appropriate because as soon as you picked up the phone, you could be sure Mrs. Kowalski, the little old lady from down the street who shared the same party line, would quietly lift her receiver and join the party, albeit surreptitiously.

If you discussed anything remotely personal, like, say, the fact you had roast beef for supper and it was yum yum, you could be certain Mrs. Kowalski would gleefully spread the news to the whole neighborhood before sundown.

During my rare phone calls, I would confess to friends regarding gruesome murders I had not committed just to add a little spice to Mrs. Kowalski's otherwise humdrum life. I sometimes claimed to have buried the bodies next to the begonias in her garden.

I'm not singling Mrs. Kowalski out here; both my sisters also listened in on our neighbor's conversations. There were four or five families on our party line and none of us had secrets from any of the others. Just like with Facebook, everybody knew everybody else's business.

So do I worry when I post marginally personal stuff on Facebook? Not really. I grew up without privacy and have learned to get along without it.

I'm just sorry Mrs. Kowalski passed years before the first Commodore 64 rolled off the assembly line and decades before anyone had heard of a social network. She would have loved this stuff. She was a woman who cared deeply about your roast beef supper.

Mike Taylor's new paperback, Looking at the Pint Half Full, is available at mtrealitycheck.com and in eBook format at Barnes & Noble, Borders Books and most major online booksellers. Email the author at mtaylor325@gmail.com.