Inspector Lispington, I presume.
Today I decided to get back online after about two weeks of exile. I realised almost as soon as I got back on the internet how addicted I am to it. I’ve discussed the merits of a good internet search with friends, following links further and further and further through forum and tag and blog post, finding forums on ‘The Game’, blogs discussing the links between Bret Easton Ellis and Talking Heads, and big-up reviews of bands that didn’t make it.
I have always loved a good mystery; starting with the adventures of Enid Blyton and moving on to Agaton Sax, Emil and the Detectives and a book I can’t remember the name of but it involved a family and a dog, code-named briefcases, a toddler called Tommy whose favourite word was ‘shok-lit’, schoolboys that had invented a green chemical that they sprayed on villains’ faces and some showdown scenes on a houseboat in the Norfolk Broads.
I never liked Sherlock Holmes - he kept all his clues to himself and didn’t really let the reader have a chance to guess whodunnit - but I loved Agatha Christie (as did my sister) and we devoured practically everything she has ever written. I always used to want to be a master criminal, like Artemis Fowl, Professor Moriarty or Harry and the Wrinklies, but now I think I’d prefer to be a master sleuth. It seems too difficult to hide one’s traces over years and years, especially now that the internet is so sprawling. And I’d only like to be a master criminal unless I was never caught, and then I’d never get the recognition I deserved for being so masterful.
After reading rather sensationalist articles in the paper at New Year, in which closeted journalists claimed Twitter as the new vanguard of democracy but also as the new weapon of totalitarian states, I suddenly realised that I have been giving a lot away on the Internet. I read one article where researchers, from looking only at a random man’s facebook profile and the profiles of his top friends, guessed his password and then had access to all kinds of personal information. I bumped up all the security on social networking sites and deleted my old accounts, but you can still find traces of my 15-year-old self although you can’t click on them and they have been gobbled by Google and spat back out again. Luckily for me, my childhood obsession with codes means that my passwords have always been nigh on unguessable, not that anyone would particularly want to hack in to my email and read all the mailing lists that I’m on.
It seems as though nowadays there is nothing that can truly remain private, or unverifiable. And something that is on the Internet now may be taken off tomorrow, yet there will still be blog posts or bookmarks or links to it which will be gravestones to it once having existed, its epitaph ‘This post has been removed by the user”. A good sleuth, however, sees clues where others see dead ends. But true sleuths of literary fame would not use the Internet to find their marks, and I doubt that they would reveal all of these musings either.
