Diary – 28 September 2002

In the electronic age, a social disease is a virus you get from your email correspondents. And often from one-night stands. Three such co-respondents sent me word that as an entry in their ‘address book’ my computer now had some awful disease. Complicated instructions to erase followed. When questioned, not one of the owners of these infected emails could describe the address or special characteristics of their virus. ‘It’s the worst and I don’t understand it,’ whined one. I don’t have a card to give out and so I’ve luxuriated in the belief that my name and details remain my own. Now I realise that when I scribble my email address down on a bit of napkin in order to calm down an inebriated dinner partner searching for confirmation that the evening has been a success, I am likely to end up in the company of people I spend my life avoiding. Either out of laziness or technological ineptitude, instead of sending each infected partner a separate email, these virus warnings contain the entire address book of the sender. I expect all those people from guardian.co.uk and myunderpants.com are as unhappy at seeing my name on the list as I am at seeing theirs, but what’s one to do? I wouldn’t want to license email users, but is it unreasonable to expect that if you engage in something as potent as electronic communications, you bloody well understand the basics about it?

I don’t suppose when the Prime Minister of Japan went to North Korea and made his ritual apology for the horrid things the Japanese did during their 50 years of occupation he expected young Kim Jong-il to say, OK and by the way we kidnapped 11 of your young people but, good news, four of them are still alive.