The Pursuit of Privacy

I've recently been frantically deleting old posts, tweets, photos and details of my name from social networking sites, as well as tightening privacy and security settings. I've tried to get rid of anything that can too easily identify me, my interests, or my friends. I have a vague idea that this has been done for reasons of privacy. But, overall, this is a pointless and bad idea for a number of reasons.

Firstly, no one cares about my details. I'm not rich, famous, or successful. If I were planning a career in politics or the like, I could understand why I've done this, but I'm not, so I don't.

Secondly, even if someone did genuinely seek to undermine me or use my past words against me, my precautions would be ineffectual. Basically, I'm not so good at IT that I could truly protect myself from such threats online if they existed.

Thirdly, I've basically committed cultural genocide against myself:

Twitter's probably the most painful example. I've deleted tweets which might be viewed as too inflammatory or foul-mouthed alongside those which might compromise my security. I've gone from about 1,600 tweets to 200, and now they mostly consist of short one-sentence answers to other people's tweets. I'm too vain to let my tweet-count slip to zero, but I'm too paranoid to allow anything interesting to remain.
edit: Fuck it, I'll delete them all, barring the first one, which will show when I joined, and a second explanatory one, explaining the lack of future posts. I'm nothing if not methodical.

On Facebook, I've deleted all old photo albums, even those which appear benign. I'm not sure why; although my friends could access them, my outside privacy settings were secure. Maybe I just don't trust my friends, but then, of course, they'll have other photos of me anyway, and won't always have the same stringent privacy settings that I employ. This goes back to my second reason listed above. Anyway, beyond photos, I've also started going back over all my old statuses and postings, and deleting them, bit by bit. Again, secondary reason, this is pointless because a lot of my filthy incendiary comments are probably on other people's walls, not to mention what I may've said in countless "private message" conversations (which I can only delete from my side).

Anyway, this talk of wall postings, tweets and status updates lead me onto expanding the third reason. I generally put a lot of effort into my updates and tweets. I sometimes looked back on them and smiled, thinking how enormously clever I was. As each was accompanied by a date and a time, they acted as handy reminders of how I might've felt at a certain time, during a certain period of my life. At the very least, they would've been a good archive of some of my more interesting thoughts and ideas.

Maybe I'm actually being vain in thinking this matters at all. Surely the only reason I'd ever truly look back is because I was writing my autobiography, having achieved a great deal in public life? Am I planning to attain a great and notable standing at some point in my life? Not really. So why should it matter if I'm deleting my past?

Perhaps I feel blasé about this whole trauma because I've been reading a lot about Mark Twain recently, who had a healthy disregard for truth and accurate memory ("Truth is the most valuable thing we have, so I try to conserve it" etc.). If I ever rise to prominence, I'll take the opportunity to rewrite my life and reinvigorate the past. Who'll contradict me? Mark Zuckerberg? HA! Show me the evidence.


P.S. All this has made me realise the hypocrisy of this public blog. However, barring a few privacy lapses, it's not too personally compromising. It shall remain. But it'll have to get more interesting to soak up the wisdom and wit from the deleted social-networking posts (Ha. Prove they weren't!).

Kaiser Chiefs: A Brief Study of Lyrical Mediocrity.

This study is almost so brief that it may as well be left to the title to say it, but I'll expand a little.

The Kaiser Chiefs, along with The Killers and suchlike, were one of the new indie bands everyone liked when I was about 15. Indie had nothing to make me like it. It was popular and bland, and thus beyond redemption. It stood out in no category. Musically? Below average. Passion? Below average. Lyrics? Below average. And yet I decided I liked the Kaiser Chiefs enough to refrain from turning off their music where possible.

It is possible, if not likely, that I professed to like them purely to increase my credibility should I ever make the dubious claim that I'm a tolerant person with regards to music.

Anyway, they were, for the album I had, mostly harmless. 


And then I heard their single "Ruby". The first two categories remained unchanged, but lyrically, they had gone from "below average" to "psychotically poor". For those who haven't heard this delight, the chorus goes something like:

Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, Ruby
And do ya, do ya, do ya, do ya
Know what ya doing, doing to me?
Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, Ruby

Well, they still sold well, so I'm told, so clearly my opinion is less commercially-viable than your average music fan's. But what annoyed me even more than Ruby was a different song I happened to hear, called "The Angry Mob". Why did it annoy me more? Because it crossed over from the vapid and unimportant to the vapid and "political". 

Maybe I'm just a snob. I mean, In and of itself The Angry Mob isn't so vapid (of course, it's not so worthy that it deserves a proper lyrical synopsis here. Suffice to say that it doesn't like Daily Mail readers). It ends with the repeated chanting of: 

We are the angry mob
We read the papers everyday day
We like who like
We hate who we hate
But we're also easily swayed

And, in many ways, this is a fair and accurate summary of the right-wing paper-readers they speak about. So maybe I'm wrong to criticise it. It's bland and inoffensive (and harmless), just like the band itself, you could argue. The problem is that, as recently shown at Glastonbury, many people appear to regard this as the pinnacle of lyrical excellence. Wondering around near the back of The Other Stage, I saw people chanting this with such devotion and such wonderment. There's no way that this is because of its hypnotic music quality. It has none. Perhaps people are simply caught up in the moment of seeing an act they've seen on TV before. However, when criticising the lyrics, I was informed by an intelligent and astute friend, that I was wrong in my choice of target.

Regardless of what people actually thought of the lyrics (and, as indie fans, there's a good chance they weren't thinking at all), the problem is that people will see that this group is popular, hear their lyrics, and place an unnaturally large emphasis on the worth of what the Kaiser Chiefs have to say to them. However, people sometimes forget that indie, as a genre, is devoid of any lasting political significance.

I'm not a snob and I appreciate and empathise with what I assume the Kaiser Chiefs' views are. However, reaching such a wide audience, they have a responsibility - when using political lyrics - to be outstanding, to show real intellectual worth, and make people really think. With such simplistic and monotonous lyrics, they waste this opportunity. They appeal to the lowest-political-common-denominator. With laziness like that, they may as well write papers for the angry mob themselves.