Fragments. Shards of culture and information. An era of texts and Tweets.

Maybe I’m an old fogey, but I believe the wonders that individuals enjoy with advances in information technology come with a price to society — one that is still being tallied.

The leaps in technology certainly have brought forth startling gains.

Soldiers at the front in a far-flown corner of the planet can talk to their parents after breakfast. Machines can safely reach inside human bodies and remove tumors or make stitches.

Global positioning systems can track the movement of just about anything on earth.

There are more prosaic and popular wonders, too. We can text our relatives in the other room when dinner is ready, as members of my family did at Thanksgiving; buy recorded music by the song and listen to it without need of records, needles, stereos or even a nearby source of electricity; and choose the news and information we want from Al-Jazeera to customized Yahoo pages.

There are downsides to all this.

The way information moves today — Web sites and blogs of dubious credibility and background, cable channels, in addition to traditional forms such as newspapers, books and good old word-of-mouth — is highly personal, perhaps too personal.

It is one thing to disagree about how to solve the issues of the day. It is another to disagree about what those issues are.

It is another entirely to disagree about what facts are indisputably true.

Another consequence of recent advances in information technology and virtual reality is the virtual certainty that the right to privacy is eroding.

Anyone with a credit card, and probably anyone who merely uses traditional financial institutions, may have his or her activities tracked closely by increasingly sophisticated systems.

I’m a reasonably private person — at least as far as those who have columns in newspapers go.

But I think it very likely that any motivated individual who truly wanted to know my medical history, consumer habits, movements from town to town or more could get that information, without ever asking me and without me ever finding out they looked. I think that is a new phenomenon, or at least the ease of it is.

Should anyone want to take that paragraph as a challenge, I advise you not to bother.

I haven’t led a secret life, and the intrepid snooper would be wasting the immense power at his or her fingerprints by running my profile.

But I’m convinced that my right to privacy has, virtually, disappeared.