The people collector

A month or two back, The Guardian ran a photographic competition. One of the things I like best about the online version of the newspaper is its daily 24 Hours gallery of pictures from around the world and its Week In Wildlife round-up of nature photos, both featuring the work of top class professional and amateur photographers.

But this competition itself was just for fun. In one category, readers were invited to upload pictures of their dogs engaged in "typical Guardian activities" of any kind, a gentle self-referential poke at the paper's slightly left-wing liberal values and the preoccupations of its readership. The resultant Flickr gallery was full of amusing snaps of pets helping their human companions with taking out the recycling, planting vegetables in the garden, reading the paper and so on. I entered a picture of Kaos caught red-pawed with the lid of the kitchen bin around his neck; obviously, eco-warrior dog that he is, he'd been checking I hadn't accidentally dropped some recyclable stuff in there by mistake. It's not a great photo by any means (^^as you can see^^), but it was just for fun and I thought no more about it.

And then a week or so ago I got a message from Flickr saying that someone had added me as a 'friend' and to log onto the site to confirm that I knew the person and to add them to my own 'friends list' if I wanted to. I don't know much about Flickr and didn't know it had this kind of function, but plenty of sites do (Facebook, Twitter and such) and so I clicked on the link to see who this friend might be.

What I found was not a friend but a Katy collector. Screen after screen after screen was filled with pictures linked not by their content (dogs, say) or the known-ness of the friend to the owner of the snapshots, but by the defining attribute that all of the photos belonged to Katys. Or Katies. Or Katis. Or Kateys. Or any other one of the many varieties there are of spelling my (our) name. It was, I must admit, rather a creepy experience. Harmless, yes, completely so, but a little bit weird all the same. It's not the first time something like this has happened either, as some time back a man whose name I didn't recognise sent me a Facebook 'friend' request. It wasn't Katys that filled my screen on that occasion but hundreds of thumbnail-sized pictures of women - all of whom looked and were dressed in a very similar way to my profile picture at that time.

Needless to say, I declined both invitations. But it has made me re-evaluate my concept of being a collector. I always think of collections as being full of things: theatre programmes, novelty teapots, Spiderman comics, antique furniture, paintings, antiquarian books, medals, model aeroplanes, lead soldiers, maps, jewellery, doll houses, that sort of stuff. That a person might be a collector of people had never occurred to me.

What these people collectors intended to do with their specimens I'm not sure. Exhibit them (us) perhaps, or maybe contact them to find out if any of the quite random ways in which they (we) were similar - name, appearance - threw up any further quirky commonalities. Who knows? The thought of being part of a sort of virtual human zoo didn't appeal to me, and so as I turned down the offers I guess I'll never find out. I can live quite comfortably with that.