Marley's Chains: Take One

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The first time I read Dickens's A Christmas Carol, it wasn't so much Marley's ghost  that bothered me, it was the chains.  OK, the rag that tied his mouth shut was pretty creepy too, but I really had a problem with the chains.  I was too young to realize that it was an existential thing - but I now know I was undone by the notion that, no matter how sorry he was, those "sins" would follow him.  As Marley said:

"I wear the chain I forged in life, I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it."

No matter how sorry he was, he was going to haul those chains around with him throughout eternity.  It just didn't seem fair.

The same, it occurs to me is true about the strains of text, images and experience we "make link by link of our own free will" out on the Internet.  No doubt, those all seemed good decisions when we forged each link, but they grow heavier year by year.  And we cannot shed them, no matter how sorry we may be.

Actually, we cannot shed them even when we are not sorry, we cannot shed them  when they are simply inconvenient - like Uggs in a ballroom.  I came to that realization when I began my experiment with Google+.  I really liked the idea of an upside-down version of Facebook, where the small group took precedent over the reveling hoard.  So I created a "circle" that contained only the graduate students who served as graders for my large undergraduate courses.  I flung open the door in anticipation of a cozy chat with a group of young scholars who shared my interest in online education.

In walked a member of the team who was also a Google+ power user.  Trailing behind him was a chain ponderous beyond all imagining.  Posts and responses from utter strangers stretched off to the far horizon.

"Please leave those in the hall," said I.

"I cannot," said he. "They are my business." And he "held up its chain at arm's length, as if that were the cause of all its unavailing grief, and flung it heavily upon the ground again."

Well, I let him in anyhow.  But I wasn't wild about the idea.  There ought to be someway to strike off Marley's Chains when we enter the theoretically more cordial environment of Google+  The idea, I thought, was to advantage the small, the private, the constrained, yet still we forge these schizophrenic chains and drag their babbling voices behind us into any circle to which we are invited.  Rude at best, creepy at worst.
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