July 2010

This Age we live in. This beautiful, frenetic, exquisitely unpredictable Age.

Call it the Digital Age, the Creativity Age, the Age of Possibility, Impossibility, Community, Psychosis, Personality, Rediscovery, Revolution, or simply the Age of Now.

Whatever cultural scene you’re digging, it’s all a cacaphony of paradoxes, competing paradigms, and shifting ideas of whether our third rock from the sun and its inhabitants are spinning dutifully on the collective axis, or right out of control, into galactic oblivion. 

Feeling brave? Nihilistic? Existential? Here’s an article from last week’s New York Times Magazine that invites you to marinate in one slice of the whole messy enchilada:

The Web and the End of Forgetting, by Jeffrey Rosen.  

Rosen presents a compelling, intelligent snapshot of what’s happening today in the worlds of social media and social networking, communications, technology, and humanity, and how it’s scaring the pants off of many scholars, privacy advocates, philosophers, political leaders, and futurists. This “urgent problem” all revolves around “the challenge of preserving control of our identities in a digital world that never forgets.”

Chew on this:

“Facebook…now has nearly 500 million members, or 22 percent of all Internet users, who spend more than 500 billion minutes a month on the site. Facebook users share more than 25 billion pieces of content each month (including news stories, blog posts, and photos), and the average user creates 70 pieces of content a month. There are more than 100 million registered Twitter users, and the Library of Congress recently announced that it will be acquiring – and permanently storing – the entire archive of public Twitter posts since 2006.”

Yes, these numbers truly ARE staggering. In fact, I personally don’t have the brain configuration that can fathom the binary-code details of saving all tweets for official Library-of-Congress posterity, or the immense compulsion so many of us have to share all manner of content the moment we can text it.

But the issue isn’t about the numbers. It’s about what the numbers mean.

There’s been a colossal shift in our collective human landscape. No doubt about it. It started years ago, and it’s accelerating at warp speed. The shift is about how we literally connect – to ourselves and as a species, with ourselves and with others.

And like all gargantuan cultural shifts before it (has there been one this huge??), there are people on all sides of the fence. Some want to run and hide. Others want to dive right into it. Still others want to rebel, scream, kick, and fight until they drop.

In Rosen’s piece, he mentions Michael Fertik, a Harvard Law School grad, who said, “The right to new beginnings and the right to self-definition have always been among the most beautiful American ideals.” He identifies the birth of companies charging pretty pennies to improve our online brands, and he shares a term called “reputation bankruptcy,” coined by Harvard cyberlaw professor Jonathan Zittrain.

Rosen talks about the dangers and increasingly dire consequences of oversharing, and tells us about Alessandro Acquisti, a scholar at Carnegie Mellon University who studies “the behavorial economics of privacy,” which is “the conscious and unconscious mental trade-offs we make in deciding whether to reveal or conceal information, balancing the benefits of sharing with the dangers of disclosure.”

Ultimately, he shines a piercing spotlight on “the drawbacks of living in a world that never forgets.” The drawbacks spring from the rabid (and impossible) desire for control – control of our online reputations, what others think of us in general, and the amount virtual friends and strangers know about us.

In the second to last paragraph, Rosen writes:

“But a humane society values privacy, because it allows people to cultivate different aspects of their personalities in different contexts…”

I get it. I understand why people are freaking out. I understand the thousands of bad things that can happen to an overexposed human. Way beyond the lost job, compromised marriage, or unflattering photo, we’re talking everything from identity theft to leaving our children vulnerable to the evil of molesters.

But…but…what about the BENEFITS of living in a world that never forgets, even if it is thrust upon us all while we cling, kick, scream, and run futily in the other direction?

There’s so much energy being used to fight what’s happening right now. So many very smart people are trying to set up rules and systems to thwart this hyperspace shift into a radically transparent existence. Ultimately, they’re trying to contain technology, innovation, human imagination, and our genetic determination to explore new frontiers at all costs.  They may even succeed in delaying the inevitable for a while. But there’s no stopping this shift. It’s a done deal.

So, what if we got better at embracing this change? What if, instead of wasting time and energy fighting it, we found ways to consider it, accept it, and use it to our creative and/or evolutionary advantage the best we can?

At the heart of the fear is the fact that we can’t micro-manage others’ thoughts and opinions about us.

Okay.

Well, one benefit of having a long-tail history dragging in our data-saved past is we may all give far less weight to what others say, and even what Google says, and learn anew about how to nurture the relationships with our flesh-and-blood family and friends. More importantly, this may help us get a stronger, more secure sense of ourselves, so we don’t ever let anyone else define us.

“Never forgetting” by hook or by crook is a very effective way of BOOSTING AWARENESS of what we do, what we say, how we live, and how we choose to spend our time and energy.

EMBRACING our pasts – yes, INCLUDING OUR MISTAKES!!! – humanizes all of us. It gives the Holier-Than-Thou Police fewer places to hide. This desire to wipe our slates clean, to reinvent at the price of deleting what we think are the “icky” parts, denies some of the best (albiet challenging) aspects of learning, growing, and becoming better versions of ourselves.

Like the millions who are trying to wipe away the years with botox, lasers, and nip ‘n tucks, now there are millions who are trying to smooth away the online character lines of their wondrously imperfect lives. What if we nurtured a sense of curiosity about and pride of this wacky evolutionary process instead of hiding painfully behind feelings of shame, regret, and denial????

What if we all threw our shoulders back, puffed out our chests, and said, “Okay. I’m here. Say what you will. Document what you might. Input what you must, but that doesn’t change the essence of who I am, or what I choose to become.”

When I was in college, my roommate’s very wise mother said this to us one day:

“You wouldn’t care what other people thought of you if you knew how little they did.”

Perhaps we can seize this opportunity before us, the one that’s happening anyway whether we like it or not, and use it to ditch the shackles of gossip, perfection, and intolerance.

Perhaps “The End of Forgetting” is not privacy’s armageddon, but a cosmic shove to help us transcend our pettiness, respect our flawed journeys, and invite a compassion for ourselves and others never before seen in the world – online or otherwise.