Carol Sarler
1 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 it is mad, bad and dangerous.
2 She is in every 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.
3 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 the 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.
4 What frightens me is that my daughter rejects all this. The denial is there in 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 argue; friends are friends when, and only when, you have seen the whites of their eyes. She just rolls hers, skywards.
5 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 guests to include a variety of Internuts who, coming as they would from all corners, would need to stay overnight.
6 Overnight? In my home, my home that contains everything I care about, rather high on the list being my daughter herself.
7 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 the things they "tell" each other on the tap-tap, a tendency to murder might just have been overlooked, might it not?
8 The party did not happen. The row most certainly did.
9 When I say that if they are not nutters they are nerds, she tries to reason. Do I think she is a 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.
10 "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.
11 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 is common for men to tap-tap pretending to be women on the basis that they then get other women to communicate with far greater intimacy.
12 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 a new version of the old tale of innocents calling forth evil forces they cannot control, this time in the form of a visitor with the ever-handy axe parked in his luggage.
13 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.
14 She laughs. "See you in the morning, Mum. I'm just going upstairs to talk to my friends. Goodnight." Tap tappa tap-tap ...