The teacher taught

Let's establish some terminology first, because after 11 years in Poland I no longer speak English properly. Nor, of course, do I speak Polish with the facility of a native. So I guess this makes me not bi-lingual, but semi-lingual. Discuss. :)

By 'messenger program' I refer to those things like Yahoo, MSN, ICQ and so on which allow users to type to each live (and, increasingly, talk via microphones), send files and so on. By 'status line' I refer to those little messages which accompany one's user name on such programs, where one leaves comments about one's feelings, when one will be back on-line, and so on. For all I know, these are the accepted terms used by English-speakers all over the world; I am merely translating or calquing back from the Polish expressions, which I'm more familiar with. (The Polish expressions, of course, may themselves be calques of the English terms. In this way, I guess, a kind of universal computer language is evolving, much as there seem to be universal motorcycle languages and universal nuclear reactor languages and universal chemical textile languages evolved by specialists in each group which enable them to communicate beyond the bounds of their respective native languages.)

One of my sweet victims in the high school I used to work at had written the URL of her own webpage in the status line of the messenger program she uses, which is the most popular free one in Poland, and which I also use. I assumed, since she had placed this information in the public forum of her status line, where presumably anyone who knows her can see it, that she had no problems with it being seen. So I looked at her webpage, and I told her that it was quite interesting. However, she was startled that I had done so and said that she didn't really intend for anyone outside her closest circle of friends to look at this page. My response to this was that if she'd posted the URL of her page on her messenger's status line, then she could hardly expect the people who were on her messenger list to avoid seeing it. Nothing which is visible on the Internet, however private we may wish it to be and whatever restrictions we may put on it, is ultimately private; whether by chance or by dedicated hacking, someone unwanted may see what we write. You can never know who's looking. So we have to bear that in mind whenever we write on the Net. (I agreed, though, for the sake of her privacy and peace of mind, not to look at her page anymore. And I haven't. Well, only once. Sorry, flower. :) )

Some time later, I joined a bulletin board/discussion group for my school, which had been established by and was populated by the pupils of our school. Various discussions were under way, several of which concerned the teachers and teaching of our school. I felt myself to be in a position to comment on these opinions, and did so, agreeing with some posters and disagreeing with others. I also (I confess) shared some of my own opinions, especially concerning some of the other English teachers, which were less than complimentary. I did so thinking that this bulletin board, which seemed to be both by and for the students of the school, among whom my opinions were a) generally known and b) generally (though certainly not universally) agreed with, was not seen by anyone outside the pupils of our school.

Wrong. It transpired after some time that a number of our school's teachers had been 'lurking' (silently reading the comments without posting themselves) on this bulletin board; eventually the worsening atmosphere in the teachers' room found its expression in one of the teachers writing a long and involved post on the bulletin board making various allusions to my personal failings and general untrustworthiness in having gone behind my colleagues' backs with my opinions. (I readily admit that this itself was unacceptable behaviour, and that I should ideally have talked to them openly about my perceptions of their problems in order to find solutions. But I couldn't and didn't. My fault.) However, this action was the proverbial straw which broke the camel's back, and I felt unable to continue working with those other teachers in such an atmosphere; I resigned at the end of the school year, and now have other employment, more of which another time.

And so I have myself finally, at the cost of a job in a place I liked, learned the lesson which I so sententiously tried to teach my pupil with her URL address; nothing which is visible on the Internet, however private we may wish it to be and whatever restrictions we may put on it, is ultimately private. You can never know who's looking.

What does this mean for the concept of privacy, as we used to understand it? If every word we post and every keystroke we make is potentially visible to any number of unknowns, how do we react? Do we weigh every word we use with such paranoid care that we become unable to express ourselves freely, terrified that what we write may be misinterpreted (or worse, correctly interpreted)? Do we write whatever we think, in a 'publish and be damned' spirit, and deal with the consequences as they arise? Do we resort to a kind of cynical word-game, where what we write is without honesty, calculated merely to impress others and achieve the ends we desire (popularity, notoriety, fame) without having any core in the truth?

Or do we simply speak the truth to the best of our ability, but judging our tone and choice of language to avoid causing unnecessary offence - more or less as we do in our daily life, speaking physically in one-to-one conversations with the people we interact with?

We're not in the Matrix yet. :)