Following

The word "following" has become a widely accepted term of art in 21st-century social media circles. On Twitter, in particular, you can follow someone's posts merely by signing up for them, without any action of assent by the person being followed.

Social media has many benefits. In Tunisia, for example, and again in Egypt, the platform provided by Twitter helped opponents of the regime to organize more effectively - and therefore helped topple the government.

Let's not forget, however, the potentially voyeuristic associations of "following." Christopher Nolan's darkly lit film by that name, from 1998, is a stark reminder of this.

A protagonist without a stable sense of self starts randomly following people on the street. This soon shades into a string of burglaries motivated not so much by money as the creepy thrill of impermissibly breaking into and entering other people's private places.

It's film noir all the way, but it's not darkness for darkness sake. It's a cautionary tale about the seemy underside of the phenomenon of "following."

Getting Good at Breaking and Entering

Many exigencies can motivate burglars; often, of course, it's substance abuse. In the throes of addiction, breaking and entering, along with theft, become merely the means to an end of getting cash for drugs.

But what if the reason for the burglary were an unavoidable existential emergency: to wit, a rare genetic disorder resulting in chronological impairment? More specifically, an impairment causing someone to move back and forth between discrete moments of time, leaving their clothes behind when they do - thus necessitating burglaries to cover the ensuing nakedness.

This is the fanciful but intriguing premise of Audrey Niffenegger's emotionally rich novel The Time Traveler's Wife, which was made into a fine film last year starring Rachel MacAdams and Eric Bana. Bana's traveler commits burglary after burglary, just to stay clothed after being chronologically disrobed. I've not seen such repetition of the same crime on screen since Jeremy Irons's Moonlighting in 1983, where Polish laborers stranded on London after the crackdown on the Solidarity movement resorted to shoplifting to survive.

Yet these burglaries are completely prosaic in the context of the larger themes. What is it like, in a marriage or any intimate relationship, when, for whateve reason, one's partner is not available? MacAdams's character, the traveler's wife, has been likened to Penolope in The Odyssey, keeping the flame of the relationship alive even amid years of waiting.

The Facebook Burglar

National Public Radio treated it as one of their humorous snippets, leading into the hourly news headlines. Someone burglarizing a house outside Rome used the victim’s computer to post Facebook messages before stealing cash and jewelry. He left the computer open to his Facebook page, however, and was quickly apprehended by Italian police.

After hearing about this episode from a friend, I went to the Web looking for more details. Britain’s Telegraph newspaper reported that the burglar is 26 and the victim, who is not on Facebook, is 52. Though the burglar did not actually post anything about the crime he was committing, he did post several messages on his wall.

One wonders why the burglar didn’t also steal the computer. NPR joked that maybe his next post will be from jail, but that is not likely. Even in the age of seemingly ubiquitous Internet usage, online access for the incarcerated is severely limited.