Last month Facebook sent me an email to remind me that it was Ken’s birthday. A delightful man, Ken. Right up to his death, two years ago. There’s nothing so heartless as an algorithm, but really …
Facebook says it’s doing what it can to avoid such insensitivities. And you can see the problem. When a Facebook user dies, they often take their log-in details to the grave. So even if Ken’s widow or children wanted to halt the computer-generated reminders that they haven’t talked to Ken for a while or, indeed, that his birthday is approaching, there’s not much they can do.
On social media we all know what would happen if unverified users were allowed to declare someone dead. Facebook says it’s looking at the idea of “legacy executors”, a person that could be designated to control our online presence posthumously. Because, in a digital world, many people’s memories of a loved one are to be found, not in photo albums any more, but on Facebook. Closing down the page and deleting everything on it would destroy that archive of recollections.
The trick is to turn the Facebook page of Ken, and millions like him, into a virtual obituary without creating opportunities for trolls. It’s all about the status of the user. In our brave new world we are either “active” or “inactive”. For millennia we were “alive” or “dead”.
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Faceless behemoths like Facebook generate an aura of infallibility. But no medium should be immune to questioning. My own experience of challenging a seemingly incontrovertible reality is more than two decades old.
I was reviewing a book for a newspaper; the author was Martin Amis, who was doing a round of interviews to promote his new novel.
The week before our meeting I decided to re-read one of his most celebrated titles. Money is the story of the drug-fuelled advertising executive John Self. It being a work of postmodernism, the author leaves unanswered the question of who – with some justification – ruins Self. Instead of an explanation he provides a telephone number belonging to one of Self’s fictional colleagues.
I got to the end of Money a day or two before my interview and did so after a visit to the pub with some pals. Fortified by Tetley’s bitter and inspired by Amis, I ignored the fact that the telephone number was nothing more than a narrative device and dialled it anyway. To my surprise there was a ringing tone. I was astonished when a voice answered. The African-American lady on the other end of the line could not have been more helpful. No, she didn’t mind me calling. No, she knew nothing about a man called John Self. Yes, she did get lots of calls from young Englishmen asking about him.
It was too good a story not to mention during my interview with Amis. He looked nonplussed and persuaded me that there was no way the number could have worked because he had deliberately added too many digits. I must have misdialled in the mists of drink.
Keen to use the interchange in my review, I called again to check. Once again the same African-American lady answered. I called Atlantic Bell, the phone company, which explained that the number did not work for New York – it did have too many digits – but it worked for a state further south. I passed all this on to Amis’s publisher who promised to have the number changed in the next edition.
Amis remains my favourite living writer (so much so that my dog is named after him) and I love the idea that, in an infinitesimally small way, I helped edit one of his greatest works of fiction.
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As a journalist, my work often involves long stays in foreign hotels. My record is three months in the wonderful American Colony in Jerusalem, closely followed by stays of similar duration in the less glamorous Islamabad Holiday Inn and Kuwait City Marriott.
Happily, checking in no longer conjures up strains of the Eagles and Hotel California (“you can check out, but you can never leave”). A single overnight is much more common, as with my one night in Brussels after the triggering of Article 50. I still try to adhere to a habit I picked up on those long hotel stays: writing letters back home to my children.
Having to explain a country or story to a child is a useful reporting exercise in its own right, especially since the recipients are a range of ages. The children enjoy the stamps, the letterheads conjuring up exotic locations, and Dad’s awful handwriting.
In Brussels my hotel room, though far from budget, had no stationery, an increasingly common omission in a world of tablets and, yes, at the risk of sounding monomaniacal, Facebook.
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