Marley's Chains: Take Two

OK - it is still not ready for Prime Time, but here is the second take:

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 "chains of 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, all those links seemed good decisions when forged, when we hit post, link, send or tag.  Each link a momentary insight, a fleeting truth. But now 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, quoting poor Marley, "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 of Google+ was, I thought, was to advantage the small, the private, the constrained. Yet still we hit "share" and forge anew these schizophrenic chains, condemned to drag their babbling voices behind us into any "Circle" to which we are invited.  Rude at best, creepy at worst.

It is not so much my own chains that trouble me, though a quick Google search reveals them significant in their own right.  Still, I have, after all, been laboring on Marley's Digital Chains for a mere mite of my life.  I was already 45 years old when the digital forge leapt to fire.   Hence many a callow and foolish link lay forgotten amidst the dust of analog attics.  Letters, notes, diaries, poems and photographs were abandoned, with only occasional regrets, to be swirled away by the insistent winds of time.

Time was when time was forgotten.  That was the world before Facebook.  I read, with the same blend of fascination and horror we bring to train wrecks and natural disasters, of parents setting up Facebook accounts for their children in utero.  An ultrasound image anchors the profile of the unborn.  I swear, I wake up sweating.  But Marley chuckles, smashing away at the forge: "They're gonna love this at preschool."  These are the chains that worry me.

I have nothing against memory, though as I have mentioned elsewhere, I prefer her more forgiving twin, memoir.  But the Internet's blind fidelity to "that which was entered" crafts for us all trailing tails of Marley's Chains.  They are chains sometimes of our making, sometimes forged by others, often beyond our own view, and largely permanent.

In closing let us turn again to Dickens:

"Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead," said Scrooge. "But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change."

Perhaps we should consider departing from some of the courses down which we follow our Internet guides.  Perhaps every thought should not be given voice, perhaps some images should be restrained, perhaps some video should remain private, some music neither "liked" nor "not liked."  Perhaps, since we cannot break them at our leisure, some chains should be left in the foundary.