What I don’t understand is why the government think that it’s going to make the world a safer place to know the ins and outs of everything we do and say online. Yes, I know that bad people are planning bad things via the internet, just they are doing exactly the same thing on the phone, in the back rooms of pubs, and front rooms across the country. And you know what, they always will, for as long as there are bad people in the world. But this doesn’t mean that they need to snoop on us all. If it does, why do they not have a civil servant standing in the corner of all our front rooms and public houses taking notes of everything we say?

And how many years has the Royal Mail been in existence? Never have they seriously suggested that the government should be keeping a record of every piece of post that is delivered. Even if they did, unless they made it compulsory for every piece of mail to have not just the recipient’s details displayed on the front, but also the the sender’s and a brief subject line of what it’s about. So why are email and online transactions any different? It just doesn’t make sense.

To do without television, it turns out, was an easy thing to do. We watched Doctor Who last week, and then that was it, we didn’t watch it again. The internet was altogether a bit different. It didn’t help that I discovered a slight fault with three of my websites that needed resolving, and whilst it was a job for the webhosts and not me, I did have to keep in the loop to ensure it was all fixed.

But it was nice – so, so nice to live at home and have it as the default positon that one would curl up in the armchair with the book instead of reaching for the laptop or the TV remote. We should do this more. One of the reasons that I found the internet hard was that I have grown to like, and feel comfortable with, updating my twitter/facebook/journal with brief (and possibly interesting/intriguing and/or fun) tidbits of what was happening. I could do this by text of course, and did, and the one updated the other, and it did mean that whilst I did visit such pariahs of time-wasting like facebook on my phone, my experience was limited to a random selection of 6 news items at a time and unless people made particular reference to me or my posts, I was refreshingly ‘out of it’.

I must do this again sometime.

What I do find somewhat remarkable is that given its surge of popularity, it has not joined the list of sites blocked on workplace networks. It also leads me to consider an interesting conundrum. With so many employees using the service, and more often than not from their work PCs and in work time, one wonders how many top managers might also have been lured onto the site. And how would this news to be seen by the manager’s staff. It could be seen that they were refreshingly in touch with popular culture, but it could also be taken the wrong way. Overstressed, underpaid ‘worker-bees’ might start complaining that the divisional manager or CEO/MD should be spending more time addressing the concerns of their staff rather than spending the hours constantly updating their status with witticisms and nudging ex-classmates from East Ildleworth Grammar School in 1953.