Column - The Internet is God

CHRISTIANS on Saturday celebrate the birth of the son of God, who sees all and forgets nothing, damn it.

But pity us heathens, who've long thought we, at least, could sin in private, without getting torched.

For us, this Christmas, that keen-eyed God has been reborn, too. Only this time he's called the internet.

This rebirth of God will please Christians, who've missed out on the pleasure of sins to which unbelievers could discreetly treat themselves with no sign on this earth of any punishment.

It seemed unfair, but what could a Christian do, when God monitors even their thoughts with his unsleeping eye, and notes it all for the day of reckoning?

As the Old Testament warns: "Nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account."

Every other major faith declares it has some deity or karma that's ever watching ... because it's actually the thought of being discovered, rather than the revulsion at having sinned, that keeps most of us on our toes.

But suddenly the internet, helped by the new manners it's helped to fashion, has ended secrecy and abolished privacy for the godless, too. We're all now watched.

Nick Riewoldt, the St Kilda captain, this week found that even a photograph of his (innocently) naked self taken by a teammate on a footy trip in the United States, and in the privacy of a hotel room, is now on Facebook and available to every home on the planet with a phone line and a computer. And there it will stay until Judgment Day.

Or take the case of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who leaked thousands of documents in which American diplomats noted what they considered their private thoughts about what foreign leaders considered their private behaviour. Now that's all there for billions of people to pore over.

So is Assange's own sex life, ironically.

A few taps on my keyboard and I can read what he wrote in heat to a dating site, and what he wrote in fury to a woman who turned him down.

I can even tell you his condom habits in Sweden, and whose leg he rubbed with his naked groin in a Stockholm flat.

It's all there on the internet, for the world to see until the day Assange meets his maker - or at least obituarist.

But all this is not quite enough to explain the rebirth of God. The internet may have a memory that lasts for eternity, but it still sees only what some human taps onto its screen.

Thing is, though, we now confess everything to that ever-glowing presence, tweeting even our instantly regretted first thoughts. Think of the Catherine Deveny, sacked by The Age this year after tweeting of her desire to see young Bindi Irwin "get laid".

And think also of our new culture of betrayal. Think of the dirt-dishing memoirs of former Labor leader Mark Latham, who brayed to the world what former colleagues whispered to him in confidence, trusting to a code of silence that's as dated as integrity.

It's this culture of betrayal that feeds the internet, through the yawning maws of Facebook or Twitter, which promise instant fame to the disher of the worst dirt. The Facebook Judas.

Still, this reinvention of the all-seeing God will at least force better manners on heathens today, just as the all-seeing Christian God did on Romans.

I'd bet many footballers will already have been warned that a false move at some Christmas party could become an instant YouTube sensation from Dandenong to New York. One vengeful girlfriend and their name could be mud even in Vladivostok.

Watch yourself, friends, because the internet is now watching, too. Just as God did, or always has.