English Article

Tap tap tappa tap-tap. It is the last sound to be heard before sleep. On especially

bad days, it is the first sound to be heard in the morning. It is the sound of the only

lasting disagreement in a household that is otherwise peaceful. My daughter is hooked

on the Internet and I think that is mad, bad and dangerous.

She is very other respect a sensible young woman. She graduated in the summer,

she goes to work each day, she and her friends are on the phone all evening and she

goes out with them at weekends. But on top of that she has lately started spending

some two hours in intense communication with a computer. And I hate it.

This is not just fear of new technology. Of course, there is value in instant access

to information banks worldwide and, of course, email is revolutionizing the way we

correspond with each other. My mistrust is based on the fact that this use of internet is

such a pale copy of the time-honoured way in which people communicate with each

other. It leads to intimacy before acquaintance; it scatters secrets outwards, not

inwards; and, most worrying of all, it is a vehicle for liars.

What frightens me is that my daughter rejects all this. The denial is there the

language she uses. “I ‘met’ Janet in January,” she says, “and we’ve been ‘friends’ ever

since.” At other times, “I was ‘talking’ to Alex the other day and he ‘said’…” “No, he

didn’t,” I argued; friends are friends when, the only when, you have seen the whites of

their eyes. She just rolls hers, skywards.

Imagine this. When I was planning to go away for a few days last month, this

intelligent 22-year-old announced a plan for a party, the gusts to include a variety of

Internets who, coming as they would form all corners, would need to stay overnight.

Overnight? In my home, my home that contains everything I care about, rather

high on the list being my daughter herself.

She said: “Don’t be silly.” She said it would be quite all right, because the people

she was planning to invite were those whom she had ‘known’ for at least a year and

whom she ‘knows’ as well as any of her other friends that, on the whole, I tend to like.

I said, trying to be reasonable but not altogether succeeding, that in and among things

they ‘tell’ each other on the tap-tap, a tendency to murder might just have been

overlooked, might it not?

The party didn’t not happen. The row must certainly did.

When I say that if they are not nutters they are nerds, she tries to reason. Do I

think she is nerd? Absolutely not. Well, then, why should they be? Do I think she is a

liar? Just as absolutely not. Seizing the initiative she moves over to the attack.

“You remember that favourite story of yours, the one about how the army captain

and the woman whose book he discovered got to know one another solely through

writing letters? And how she refused to send him a photograph because she felt that if

he really cared, it wouldn’t matter what she looked like? Well, they hadn’t seen each

other either.” She smiles her self-satisfied smile. Arguing with a daughter is always

like that, so annoying. They always know where your weak points are, just where to

slip in under your guard.

But I cannot clear it from my head, the worries refuse to go away. It is not that, as

individuals, I have reason to believe they would lie. But they could. They could lie

about their age, their state of mind or even their sex. Indeed, apparently in America it

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is common for men to tap-tap pretending to be women on the basis that they then get

other to communicate with far greater intimacy.

A thought occurs. The worst scenes my mind dreams up play like a horror movie.

So I call a friend in Hollywood: has anyone thought of this for a movie plot? He

laughs. There are five, to his knowledge alone, in development and one heading into

production. Needless to say, it is the new version of the old tale innocents calling forth

evil forces they can not control, this time in the form of a visitor with the ever-handy

axe packed in his luggage.

So now, I say to my daughter, we just wait for life to imitate art and we’re home

and dry. And murdered in our beds.

She laughs. “See you in the morning, Mum. I’m just going upstairs to talk to my

friends. Goodnight.” Tap tappa tap-tap…

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