From the farm to the fourth floor

A family moves from a house with its own land in the north of Qatar to a flat on the fourth floor of a building in Doha.

Out there, the rules were simple because there was room. Play the radio as loud as you liked. Park wherever you stopped. Keep a rooster that started at dawn. Nobody was near enough to mind, and that distance was a kind of freedom.

In the building, the same habits land on other people. The radio comes through a wall. The car blocks a neighbour. The rooster is not an option. Nothing about the family has changed, only the distance, and the distance had been doing most of the work.

There is a second freedom on offer in the city, and it is a good one: the freedom of being near people. Help carrying the shopping upstairs, children playing in the corridor, a neighbour who notices when you have been unwell. It costs a little care in return.

Online, nearly all of us now live on the fourth floor. A comment meant for a friend lands in front of strangers of every age and background. A seller answering an angry customer in public is answering everyone who reads it. A joke that was harmless on the farm does not work in the corridor.

Many of the arguments about how people behave online are really arguments between those two freedoms, made by people who never noticed they had moved.

The skill now is not independence. It is being good company in close quarters, and it can be learned. Most of us simply learn it some time after we arrive.