About 10 years ago, I was at a design conference in Aspen (harsh, I know), when Razorfish-founder-turned-candy-designer Craig Kanarick gave a presentation on digital design. He wore a gold lurex jacket and strode around the stage telling the less digitally savvy audience how digitally savvy Razorfish was. To be fair, he made a lot more sense than architects Zaha Hadid and Hani Rashid, who were also on the schedule. They showed impenetrable sketches of buildings they designed using a computer, which only a computer could occupy.
One thing Kanarick said has really stuck with me. It's really simple, but really true. Back in 1999, Kanarick, with his bleached hair and flashy jacket, said that Razorfish's guiding principle was simply, "anything that can be digital, will be."
At the time, my reaction was, sure it's easy to say that. Photos, music, film, documents, everything could be digital. I got it. Flip open the scanner, or type into a computer and put it on the web. But I think he was getting at more than the process of taking analog information and making it digital. I think he was talking about anything, I mean anything, being digital.
In the decade since, I have become a digital commodity.
By this I mean, I obviously exist in a flesh-and-blood way, but I increasingly exist in a digital hyper-reality. Through social networking sites I've become an online persona, a digital nexus of old friends and contemporary connections, overlaid by a web of familial linkages. Socially connected me represents past, present, and potential future.
With Second Life, I'm my avatar, whoever I want to be. I can live in a tower of crystals, half medieval castle, half Greek forum; I can have red hair, wear sexy pirate clothes and shop for a pair of wings. Now that's better than a real life trip to the grocery store, now isn't it?
To data mining companies, I'm a pattern of data points. If I were 20 years younger, and texting as fast as my hormones were racing, I'd be Text Me, a collection of messages, reduced to diminutive shorthand. LOL. WTF.
So what's the logical conclusion? Where does it all end? At what point does the psychic apparatus resist the urge to exist in external data form? Will we tire of the technology? Will we want to reclaim some of our internal life? Will privacy become our most valued asset?
Who knows? I'm blogging about this, sending links to Facebook and Twitter, and hoping that someone will read this because, "In the construction of Immortal Fame you need first of all a cosmic shamelessness."*
*Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality
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2 comments:
You've asked to be my Facebook friend. But I don't know you. The flesh-and-blood undigitized you. While I appreciate your meta column, I have no time or interest in staring at your data points. I have less interest in you having access to mine. I'm raising children and above else, I am trying to teach them the balance between the technology we're creating and the world we actually live in. You still live here. Your actual ass still likes to be planted in an actual seat while your actual fingers turn you into zeros and ones. So I recognize your effort, respect your writing. But I won't help you become one more person who spends their life staring into the window of their screen while the real world moves and dies and blooms around them.
Crap. If I know you, please forgive my high-handedness. I'm having this horrible recollection that I know you. It's much easier to reject strangers than friends. And it's also easy to stick by big honkin' foot in my big honkin' mouth.
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