• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, July 11, 2013

“Did you happen to notice that I was gone for two hours?” my sweaty wife says in a strangely accusatory tone as she plucks her earbuds after the nightly run.

“It did seem to be getting on, but I had a lot of work to do.”

“You didn’t wonder where I was? Worry just a tad?”

“I had a lot of work to do. I get a lot done when you go out on runs. You tend to wander. I count on it. The police didn’t call. Then I would worry in a hurry.”

She starts blinking quickly at me, which is an early warning sign -- much like a movie time bomb with an eccentric timepiece.

“You are very sweaty,” I say, trying my bomb squad skills. “You must have had a good run.”

Well, that didn’t work.

Truth be told, I love my wife deeply. I just don’t really need or want to know where she is at any given moment. And I gather that is the case with most of us, because Google announced yesterday it was discontinuing its Latitude service, which let users know where friends were. Actually, the functionality is not going away so much as being folded into Google+, which may not thrill Latitude fans. That could be just another way of killing the people locator feature as it gets lost in the clutter of Google+ features. Google appears to be on a campaign to push people into using their also-ran social net as a hub of multimedia activity.

I haven’t a clue how much use people locators really get. I hazard a guess that the strange fantasy at the heart of these services -- that people wanted to know their closest friends’ whereabouts and broadcast their own -- was bringing the social networking ethos a step too far. True, you can throttle some of these settings to truly track your movements to merely checking in at select places. But these varied levels of live-ness to the data and patchy participation make for a strange map.

I was always more drawn the idea of locating friends and family with devices in a one-shot fashion. Apple’s Find My Friends seemed to have that in mind at least at first. It allowed for pretty easy toggling of tracking. A family at a mall or friends at a concert could set their devices for tracking pretty easily for a specific occasion. When they added a geofenced notification element earlier this year, however, it got a little creepier. The variable geofence can be made to alert you of someone entering specific zones.

So I guess I could tag and track my wife so I get an alert if she wanders, or is forcibly abducted, outside of her running route. But then I might also know that she dawdled at the local river and talked to the snakes (yep, she does that) or that she stopped for fifteen minutes at 21st and Baynard, leaving me puzzled, likely for no good reason.

But that is too much, too close. We make the mistake in the age of information of presuming more is more. Humans natively spend a good deal of our consciousness on establishing filters, blinder and walls of denial. I recall, years ago, my daughter instructing me that she loved text messaging not because of the hyper-connectedness it allowed with friends but the control it allowed over the communication. “When you are on a phone call, they might just blather on and you can’t get them off.”

It is easy to mistake communications technologies and social nets as idealized tools of expressiveness and social sharing. Right. There are still humans driving these things, using all the same subterfuge, misdirection, control, deflection, manipulation and faux sharing that have characterized social interactions from the time we could grunt and make hand gestures.