Do your feel it? On a visceral level, do you know that part of your life is digital? Unless someone has printed this out for you to read, I’m guessing that you are as immersed in the digital world as I am. Maybe more.
I stepped away from Facebook and Twitter two weeks ago because the digital deluge was creeping dangerously close to my chin. I stepped away from video games several years ago. I text about three times a month.
I have largely sequestered emails, stock prices, ballgame scores, and headlines to specific times of the day, but still I have the itch to check when I hit a pause. Digital addiction is one point of evidence that we live blended lives, and it is a physical craving, like the urge for a cigarette or a drink.
More benignly, I feel a blend of confidence and curiosity when I do any sort of online writing. It is very close to what I feel when I have a face-to-face conversation with an interesting person, but not precisely. And my online persona is not the same as my in-person persona.
The texture and experience of living some of my life online is only one part of the Digital Blend. Last time, I wrote about making friends with advisors that only exist in computers, being restricted by our technology-assembled profiles, and how we ultimately will be unable to escape our digital connections. Today, I’m looking at the coming subjective world and antisocial networks.
Subjective world
We do not see the same world when we go online. This goes beyond the (very large) effect of what we choose to explore or attend to. Our ads are tuned, based on our history, but so is what comes up in a search engine. (I wrote about this in my other blog.) I expect that soon online newspapers and magazines will put articles I am likely to be most interested in up front (if it isn’t happening already). Storyfication is a step along this path.
I suppose the reshaping of our online experiences so that they are cozy and familiar will be extended to our physical worlds. We see this in cars, where driver and passengers not only can adjust their own seats, but also have separate controls for climate.
Push this further so the office cubicle detects who is touching down there and automatically transforms it to make it more comfortable. Bring this to your living room chair, and then extend it to music, scents, artwork, and perhaps even where the condiments sit in the refrigerator. Push further to tint walls, open windows, and reconfigure a guest room. Future marriage counselors, when they hear a client complain that she and her husband live in different worlds are likely to discover that it is literally true.
Antisocial networks
It’s probably more than obvious that digital personalities can become toxic. Anyone who has a blog or reads one regularly knows about “trolls” who seem to find validation for their sad lives through denigration and insults. While there seems to be a shift in malware producers toward though are look for profit or a political voice, we still have hackers, often working together, who express themselves through vandalism.
I believe a genius for good can emerge from online teaming, but the flip side is evil genius. And a concern I have is that the medium, with its apparent immediacy but lack of social cues, can lead to worldviews built on misunderstandings and even alienation.
This real risk is part of what’s behind my sporadic retreats from the digital world. I consider making sure that the blended version of myself is in balance to be a personal responsibility. But, for all of this, the answer of what is “right” is unexplored territory. We need good criteria and questions to guide us, and, given the rapid changes in technology that help needs to be kept up-to-date. Ultimately, I suspect that we will see a new profession of identity counselors emerge. We need them now, but I can’t even guess how many more years it will be before we see them.