Joseph O’Neill - The Dog

Dr Wilson has taken his deep scholarly knowledge of the processes that give rise to the historic perception of nations, and applied it to the contemporary arena of country branding, public diplomacy, and reputational risk management. At RCF he has been instrumental in the successful development of Brand Dubai and other country brands. Dr Wilson’s expertise at measuring, building, and managing Arabian Gulf national and commercial assets has been internationally acclaimed, with his team at RCF winning BrandWeek ’s Best Emerging Market Story 2006 (for the ‘Do You Really Know Dubai?’ campaign), and also winning UAE Tourism’s Most Valuable PR Campaign 2007 (‘Hospitality of the Desert’).

I visited RCF’s site. Under the ‘Our Team’ tab, Ted Wilson was designated ‘Team Leader, Country Branding Visions and Operations’. The photograph showed a smiling Wilson. Resting neatly on his forehead was a pair of round red spectacles. The caption asserted,

Ted is so ridiculously bright that at RCF we call him Two-Brains. User-friendly to the max, he is unsurpassed in his commitment to making Total Branding concepts a reality for our clients. When he’s not burning the midnight oil, Ted enjoys scuba diving. ‘I’m very lucky to have the best diving water in the world right on my doorstep,’ he says.

I went further with my investigations, if that is the right word. It turned out that in addition to LinkedIn, Wilson had Friendster and Facebook and MySpace and Vimeo and Twitter accounts to his name and in each case had opted to make public the content of his pages, so that even I (who was then, and am now, a non-member of any such site) could freely and immediately access their content and, by implication, Wilson himself. I well understood that in Wilson’s work circles, a certain trendy visibility was advantageous. Still, I was taken aback by the man’s forwardness, which struck me as unbecoming as well as surprising. The surprise was of my own making: extrapolating from my sense of him as a furtive aquanaut and standoffish elevator rider, I had had in mind the conception of a lone wolf or lone ranger — by which I of course mean a man who keeps himself to himself, not a masked searcher for truth and justice. As for my judgment of unbecomingness, I quashed it right away, and not without guilt. I was the unbecoming one. I had no right to pass judgment on Wilson on the basis of some unexamined taste preference or, come to think of it, on any basis, especially as I knew very little about social networking services and their norms and could easily have been misdirecting at Wilson a more general horror founded on little more than my unfamiliarity with these virtual communities, whose character struck me as falling bafflingly between the stools of Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft . If Wilson was innocuously and/or self-servingly into this sort of socializing, that was entirely up to him. Laissez faire. To each his own. Mind your own business. Judge not, that ye be not judged. Honi soit qui mal y pense . Take a look in the mirror. Turn the other cheek.

With hindsight — with retrospective knowledge of Wilson’s complicated arrangements — it appears that I missed an important function of his web presence. There is no reason to believe that Wilson’s incessant posting (he offered across his various platforms a not unusual mix of family and leisure photographs, day-to-day bulletins, whimsical observations, links to enthusiasms and amusements) wasn’t genuine. I’m sure he got real satisfaction from his social networking activities, including the entirely understandable satisfaction of being (and being seen) at his most optimistic, interesting and well-behaved. But I think it becomes reasonable to theorize a further objective: Wilson was making a hiding place out of conspicuousness. The concealed space was created negatively, from his advertisement of a comprehensive or filled life, a life apparently without room for much else: where would such a man find the time to have a second life?

Facebook was Wilson’s most important forum, and his use of other sites was relatively light. He had 264 Facebook friends, which back then seemed like a lot. These friends were located all over the world. His ‘Wall’ (which served not the enclosing and defensive function suggested by the noun but the contrary function of disclosure and welcome) saw much activity, with Wilson posting up to ten times daily and eliciting many Likes and messages. I must confess that I was quite moved. The gatherers at this Wall were clearly touched by the better angels of their nature. They were cheerful, funny and supportive. They deeply loved their children and their spouses, they cooked experimentally and generously, they read revisionist histories and challenging novels, they loved music and art and even dance. They were civil. They had grit. They cut each other slack, gladly granting one another the footing that, man or woman, black or white, Christian or Muslim, whether in Oslo or Dhaka or Windhoek, she/he was doing a good job, in trying conditions, of whatever it was he/she was trying to do. They shared educated and thoughtful insights into world politics and trustworthy links to pictures of cute dogs and new monkey species. They made common their feelings. They grew. They rooted for and bore sympathetic and useful witness to the others as, one by one, each made her or his way along life’s rocky path, facing en route the loneliness, discouragement and pain that are the inevitable and persistent highwaymen of our ways. Ted Wilson, I was given to see, was a talented underwater photographer and a typeface buff. He loved listening to Gomez, Wilco, Nick Lowe, Squeeze, Fountains of Wayne and Brandi Carlile. He had watched The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou ‘at least fifty times’, tearing up every time Bill Murray beheld the jaguar shark.

From the beginning, I’d been wary of Facebook and similar venues of connection, precisely out of a fear of the pyre of memories that awaits a match and, once lit, will set a blaze — of old friendships, old places, old desires — that would serve only to grieve me. But if this was how it worked — as a second chance, with new friends; as a rewriting of the record; as a festival of mutual absolution — I wanted some of it. I wanted to divulge my playlists and movie favourites, my moments of wit and hope and wry gloom. I wanted to become a sharer and a good egg and booster of morale, too. I wanted to friend Ted Wilson and his friends.

I couldn’t friend him, though. He had disappeared. His Facebook account had been inactive for weeks. To be exact, there were no signs of activity by Ted Wilson. His friends continued to leave concerned and bewildered messages on his Wall. One of these, from someone who went by UnderservedDeserving, caught my eye:

Teddy honey, please get in touch. Don’t worry about anything. Whatever it is, we’ll fix it. Just come back.

UnderservedDeserving, whose sex was evident, had been consistently leaving messages for Ted Wilson for at least two years. Many of these struck me as intimate and very nice. About an upcoming dive, UnderservedDeserving wrote,

Be careful out there. x

About a photo of Ted posing poolside,

Wow — hot! Must take a cold shower while watching a Dick Cheney video.

I wondered what Mrs Ted Wilson made of all this.

‘UnderservedDeserving’ had an institutional ring. I Googled it.

I’d guessed right — it was a small nonprofit with the mission of ‘connecting national charities to economically and social neglected communities in Chicago’. The home page carried a photograph of its founder and managing director — Mrs Ted Wilson. Oh, right, I thought. Now I get it.

There’s no such thing as ‘to get’ something. The inevitable consequence of resolving knotty unknown A is the creation of knotty unknown B, in this instance: What was the deal with this Facebook thing between Ted Wilson and his American wife (whom I cannot bring myself to call Mrs Ted Wilson I)? What was the deal with their marriage?