The World-wide Party Line

I am old enough to remember the (one) phone in my family’s house being on a “party-line”. For those of you who are too young to know, a party-line was not the inside track to the nearest gathering, but a phone-line shared by at least two “parties”. My memory is that there was only one other family on our line, other party lines had more. When the phone rung – we counted the rings to make sure it was for us.

Of course, we could pick up the phone and listen in to the conversation the other party was having . . . and, as kids, we did. Sometimes we weren’t caught. Sometimes – especially when we snickered – we were.

Even if the members of the other family eavesdropped on our conversations, it wouldn’t have been such a big deal. Not much to hide in our household.

Maybe it’s a good thing we went to a private line while I was still in Elementary School. But by then, we had two phones in the house . . . and could still listen in . . .

All pretty harmless, all told.

I wonder if this naïve sense has followed us up into the age of complete connection. When I grew up, we needed to rely on actual memories of conversations or things experience; now many of our conversations (albeit most in text form) and images of our experiences are accessible somewhere on-line to refresh our memories . . . or to "inform" other

folks.

Now, many of my memories are ones that could readily be shared. Some aren’t. I’m glad some of those memories come from private times.

However, today, with as Husna Najand points out in her post, Beware: the Internet could own your future "Privacy no longer means having control over who has access to pictures and information."

Hmmm. As I drift farther from those days, I have grown fond of the saying, "Youth is wasted on the young". Ahh, exhuberance, energy, and having the ability to bounce when dropped after having done "youthful things". Let’s hope that some wisdom creeps in there, too.

On a lower moral developmental level, the wrong-ness of something depends partly on if we get "caught" or not. Perhaps the permanence of our words and actions now (more of a) reality with the internet creating a greater likelihood of "getting caught", we have an opportunity to have a dialogue to re-evaluate what is appropriate and respectable.

Who knows, we might learn something . . . like when my Mom caught me listening in on the party line.

I’ll hang up now.