Tracker

Slice of Wednesday

Up until ten years ago the idea of casually tracking someone’s location in live time via your phone was firmly in the realm of espionage, super fancy cars, the military or the elite. George Orwell published Nineteen Eighty Four in 1949, with that chilling and limiting fear of being surveilled - and we not only bought into it, we’re now holding the cameras ourselves. It feels like everyone is using location-sharing, and it’s even free. My sister in law affectionately calls Life 360 the Family Stalker App and that’s not wrong. Nearly 80 million users per month globally use this app, which pitches itself as a family safety app, most commonly, apparently, used to track young drivers.

Parents everywhere are tracking kids movements via their mobile phones, making sure they are on the bus or train they are supposed to be on. The newly-left-homes and young drivers are tracked to make sure they are off the road and home safe. We know where the party is, and whether the kid (or at least the phone) is still there. At first I thought I would have to play the I’m-paying-your-phone-bill card to get the kids onto it, but they were strangely and genuinely co-operative. They’ve grown up in a digital landscape and are very happy that someone can locate them in case of emergency. Phones are sometimes mysteriously off, or left on charge somewhere, but mostly I know where my immediate family is at all times.

Except my mum. I put my beloved eighty four year old Mum on the app in case of emergency, not because I regularly checked up on her whereabouts at 11.30pm. Except she turns her location off. This remains a mystery to everyone including her, she doesn’t mean to do it, but on the odd occasion we are actually trying to track her down, we usually can’t. Gallivant.

I don’t check the app unless I need to, I promise. This allowed me to spontaneously run into my middle kid in a Wollongong supermarket this week completely unexpectedly which was delightful for both of us. I got to admire my gorgeous and grown up kid shopping for veggies, she got her groceries paid for. Our son, our eldest, is a bit unwell and has been in hospital in Wollongong for a few weeks, I was at the supermarket picking him up a few things and when I got to his room he mentioned that he had seen that I’d run into Tilly. Totally tracked.

You know what I wish Life 360 could tell me? Where my glasses are. Or my sense of humour. I wish it could track one clear thought in my head, which feels a bit like a London fog. Meanwhile the youngest of our three calls me to ask if I can pick up her favourite gingerbread because she has spotted that I’m near the farmers market.

We think we’re tracking them, but young people will use the technology to their very best advantage. I’m here for it. They’re not worried about AI taking their jobs, they’ll make up something new. Anyway, I’ll leave my location on, kids. Please come and pick your father and I up from the underground whisky bar, you can follow the map.

xx