Published in Beat Magazine, November 26, 2008

Why are some people still apparently unfamiliar with the concept of cause and effect? I was at a comedy gig over the weekend, watching from the back of the room. Another audience member seemed quite nonplussed about the dirty look I was giving her, apparently unable to link my expression to the phone call she had just finished. It's not like she was unaware of her surroundings – to be heard over the sound of the appreciative crowd, she was using what a patient parent may refer to as her “outdoors voice”, while apparently leaving her indoors brain unactivated. It was through this blissful ignorance that she spied me giving her the ol' stinkeye, and failed to make the mental leap between her making of too much noise, and someone looking at her as if she was making too much noise.

If the relationship between cause and effect is indeed becoming less obvious, then the idea of potential effect becomes even murkier, and Tom Stones never stood a chance. Tom is the British supermarket shelf-stacker who, as his colonial cousins would put it, “chucked a sickie” from his evening shift, then posted pictures of his night out on his Facebook page. In a turn of events that would stun anyone unaware that Wednesday follows Tuesday, Tom's employers found out, and apparently a disciplinary hearing is the result. Feigning an illness is usually a low-risk endeavour. Heading out in public when you're supposed to be laid low is a little chancier; displaying photos of your transgression on the most viral of social websites is slappably stupid. Only in a world where cause and effect are drifting apart would anyone actually have to be told “if you don't want people to know about something, don't broadcast it”. I hope that Tom has a close friend near him at all times, because if no-one is there to see him turn blue, there will be no-one to remind him to breathe.

I have recently signed on with Facebook (I suppose that makes me a Face), and am still coming to terms with its intricacies. As soon as I entered my name, pictures of me appeared, and a list of people that Facebook thought I might like to be friends with (many of whom I already was) was offered. To someone who likes a bit of privacy, this was mildly unnerving – suddenly I was in a cop movie, and Detective Sergeant Facebook was dropping a dossier of my life onto the table in front of me. Had the website in question asked me about a crime in a stern voice, I may well have confessed. But one aspect I am yet to encounter personally, and know primarily through the conversation of others, is the Poke. Apparently intended as a generic attention-getter, I've been told by people who know the protocols far better than I that it is now regarded as an opening gambit in a game of sexual attraction... the cyber-equivalent of making eye contact in a bar. I have to say that the bar scenario does offer potentially more dignity – as hackneyed as it is, looking someone in the eye and saying “can I buy you a drink” has a little more panache than a computer message saying “will you be my friend?”

In this blizzard of friend requests and Pokes, the Luddite in me longs for a simpler time, in which you would spot The Girl, and carve “I Love Sparky” into a tree that you knew she'd walk past.

Unless she's an environmentalist. The effect might not be so much fun then.