Digging Into Your Digital Footprint
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Thirty years ago the average person didn’t worry about their digital footprint. They didn’t have a social media profile or a website in most cases. Individuals were footloose and fancy free without the ever present digital shadow hanging over them. Digging into your digital footprint can reveal how our cultural concerns are changing. Young people previously had lives which didn’t demand constant documenting via technological devices. Human beings had identities outside of the pixels and bytes forming shapes and images on screens. None of these things are possible today unless you are willing to swim against the current in 2023 and beyond. Kids are constantly checking their phones for updates re-their on-screen lives. Many cannot commit to things like watching a movie without reference to the small screen in their palm. Concentration levels have been diffused into a multiplicity of intermittent calls upon their flickering attention spans.
The Digital Landscape Exposed
It is not all bad of course. Time spent on buses, trains, and in elevators are no longer uncomfortable expanses of boredom and nothingness. Now, there is always a screen to peer into and a device rich in applications ready to engage the viewer. Head down and buried in your phone is socially acceptable behaviour in the current clime. We are all more likely to diarise our lives via blogs and vlogs and social media, which will make things easier for biographers. Writing cogent text is an integral part of this. Typing on the keyboard is another skill more broadly shared by all of us, although texting via flying thumbs is preferred by the young. Telling stories in pictures, makes many of us budding director/auteurs through our time on Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok, YouTube and other forms of social media. Storyboards are familiar for a much larger section of the population. Many more of us are creators in the digital world because we have access to the tools.
A Digital Dilemma?
When I was younger and starting out in life I used to think that a choice had to be made. A choice about whether I was going to live a life in an experiential sense or an intellectual mode. Goldmund or Narcissus in Hessian terms. The sensualist or a thinker. I was torn because I enjoyed both. I appreciated reading and the life of the mind but, also, admired and loved the protagonist at the centre of the story. My earthy nature and my cerebral self both sought ascendancy in my story. Eventually, the stages of my life cycle sorted things out, with the sensualist retiring as the hedonistic years faded from my life. I bring this up because technology has pushed the young into diarising their lives. Digging into your digital footprint, it is an interesting phenomenon to observe.
We live in a youth obsessed world where everyone wants to stay young. Perhaps, it has always been thus, I don’t know. Can you live a fulfilling life with one eye constantly on how it looks to others online? Can you surrender into the experience if you are simultaneously the documentary maker? The whole digital thing is about recording stuff and computers are electronic filing devices. The digital footprint is the purview of the record keeper. Surveillance is the name of the game. Information gathering of the golden data.
Meta is betting the house on the ‘metaverse’ – a place where we will be replaced by our avatars and their adventures in a 3D digital world. Will we, as human beings become the squidgy things inside Dr Who’s daleks? Living imaginary lives, as perfectly digitised cartoon characters in the metaverse, whilst our fleshly selves consume truckloads of fast foods and sugary substances? Hide away our fat and flesh-formed failures. A dystopian view of the not too distant future, perhaps.
There is a beautiful earth – a real world. The distribution of the wealth of this real world is not fairly distributed among us. The best spots are reserved for a few and many are crowded into less than ideal living circumstances. There may well be too many of us full stop. We are creating a new world for our minds to inhabit – a metaverse. You can see where this is going.
Life will become a computer game for the majority of us to play – I am sure we will have to pay to play in some form or another.
This is the terminal where our love of technology, of those shiny smartphones, is heading. This is the brave new world that technology is ultimately promising. Kids love to play video games. Be prepared to be shackled into a lifelong video game no matter your age or point of view. It may be novel at the beginning but the game will soon lose its shine, I predict.
Robert Sudha Hamilton
©WordsForWeb
