Table Of ContentOur Virtual Shadow http://platform.atavist.com/view/tedbooks/story/718?unpublished
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Our Virtual Shadow http://platform.atavist.com/view/tedbooks/story/718?unpublished
Contents
Introduction: A fool’s errand
Anchors of memory
A reminder of nothing
The Internet has escaped
Defending our legacy
A world of mush
Fear of the unexpected
Afterword: Capturing time
Continuing the #VirtualShadow conversation
Endnotes
Thanks
About the author
About TED
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Our Virtual Shadow http://platform.atavist.com/view/tedbooks/story/718?unpublished
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Our Virtual Shadow http://platform.atavist.com/view/tedbooks/story/718?unpublished
To my wife. I promise to be fully present with you every day.
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Our Virtual Shadow http://platform.atavist.com/view/tedbooks/story/718?unpublished
Introduction: A fool’s errand
We walk from room to room, look into the room that is lit, the present moment, then walk
on. We do not know the rooms ahead, but we know we cannot change them. We are
spectators of our lives.
—Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams (1993)1
The winter rain blowing off the Pacific coast hits my windshield wipers with
a steady rhythm, droning my family to sleep. Driving through a seaside
California town, I study the tumultuous clouds in the foreboding sky. I wish
I had a fancy camera and the agility necessary to capture this moment. As I
stare at the endless horizon, I think about all the moments like this we try to
capture and hold in our memory: the feeling of our first kiss, the anxiousness
of seeing a new country, or simply the beautiful sights and damp, briny
smells of an ocean drive. I am thinking about this book.
Suddenly, a young woman jumps out of my periphery and right in
front of our car. I stomp on the brakes, waking up my passengers, and wait
for her to respond with a mouthed “Sorry!” — or even an eye roll. Instead,
she doesn’t react at all, walking slowly in front of our car like she’s leading us
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Our Virtual Shadow http://platform.atavist.com/view/tedbooks/story/718?unpublished
in a Mardi Gras parade. The narrow coastal streets prevent me from going
around her, so my instinct is to honk, but instead I opt to watch as she
continues to walk in front of us for about a half a block. She doesn’t raise
her head or change her course. I am finally able to pass her and, as we all
laugh, I look in the rearview mirror and see that she is fully focused on her
phone and furiously typing. I keep an eye on her, as she slowly becomes a
speck on the horizon, and she never once raises her head.
There is now a strong, compelling argument that technology is
distracting us. “Overwhelmed by the volume and velocity of our lives, we
turn to technology to help us find time,” TED speaker and MIT
professor Sherry Turkle wrote in her book Alone Together: Why We Expect
More from Technology and Less from Each Other. “But technology makes
us busier than ever and ever more in search of retreat.”2
The anecdotal evidence is off the charts, too. There is online
documentation, like my favorite YouTube video of a woman accidently
walking into a mall fountain while busily texting, and our own personal
experiences, like the time I ran into a San Francisco street pole while I was
tweeting on my phone. Online and mobile technology is changing our lives,
and there isn’t much of an argument to the contrary.
Our real discussion, I believe, should be about the conflict between
documenting our lives and actually living them. The explosion of social
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Our Virtual Shadow http://platform.atavist.com/view/tedbooks/story/718?unpublished
networks, micro-blogging sites, and related public forums reflects our
increased interest in tracking everything we do and the desire to share it
with ourselves, another person, or the general public. In a sense, we are
outsourcing to a virtual memory to keep track of our lives.
We’ve been blaming the messengers, not ourselves. I’m an avid Twitter
user, and whenever I talk to someone who doesn’t like Twitter, I almost
always get the same justification: “I don’t want to hear about what
somebody had for breakfast.” From this viewpoint, Twitter is a superficial
medium that encourages people to share mundane details of their lives. We
want to blame Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms for the banality of
everyday life, but we haven’t examined why we want to elevate the banality
of our lives to something more majestic in the first place.
Excessive self-aggrandizing and navel-gazing are not new human traits.
We have always waxed poetic about ourselves, but it has traditionally been
limited to isolated mediums: a dog-eared diary snug between the mattresses,
a handwritten letter passed to a lover, a scripture inscribed in a
leather-bound book. These classic tools are obviously alive and well, but at
some point we decided that they alone weren’t going to satisfy us anymore.
We now need to save our memories on disks, in forums, within the Internet
ether. The private has indeed become public. New technologies
undoubtedly carry part of the responsibility for this, but, as I discovered on
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Our Virtual Shadow http://platform.atavist.com/view/tedbooks/story/718?unpublished
my own journey, it’s much more complex than that.
The truth is, more than ever, we’re now focused on documenting and
building the history of our lives, not on living the life unfolding right in front
of us. It’s all about the check-in, the status update, the captured moment,
rather than being fully present day to day. We’re each focused on what I call
our virtual shadow: a collected narrative that, like a physical shadow, is
symbolic of where our real selves have been, albeit a few steps behind.
Think about your physical shadow and how they can get distorted based on
outside influences, how it turns your fleshy, three-dimensional presence into
a flat, paper-thin image, and how it can be manipulated by others or even
yourself to reflect something that, in reality, simply isn’t true. The same
applies to your virtual shadow. And in our new world, we’re mistaking our
shadows for our real lives. Documenting our lives isn’t new, but prioritizing
the shadow over the real is very much a modern problem.
Now, our conflict between documenting and experiencing our lives
began well before our modern technology age. In fact, it goes back at least
to the invention of early writing. Once we had the format, we began
documenting our lives — and also worrying about the tension between
writing and experiencing. Then, as now, our tools seemed to satiate our
need to feel like we are leading memorable lives. Ironically, they also
distanced us from the lives we are actually living.
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Our Virtual Shadow http://platform.atavist.com/view/tedbooks/story/718?unpublished
My intention is not to suggest a doomsday scenario where online
networks prevent us from living. Facebook, Twitter, and even earlier
networks like BBSs and instant messengers have created a wide public
discussion filled with interesting insights about how we tick, what we believe,
and where we’re going. By sharing our lives online, we are revealing
ourselves in a way that is second only to meeting each other in the flesh, and
also making connection with people we might otherwise never have met. I
spent three years co-creating the real-time quote-capturing app QuQ (short
for “Quote UnQuote”), so I definitely value the power of our newly
connected world.
That said, our digital memories will always take a backseat to our
physical memories, no matter how rich the tools get, how aggressively we
document our world, or how cool our virtual shadow seems to be. I believe
there is a law of diminished returns as we pile more and more social
applications onto our smartphones. We mistakenly think that the next tool
will finally make us feel as connected as we’d like to be. Your next gadget
probably isn’t going to replace an outdated one, like, say, a Model T
replacing a horse and buggy. Instead, it will be most likely be another
ancillary product standing alongside the ones you already use: a must-join
social network, an innovative photo-sharing app, an easier-to-use check-in
platform, etc. It’s like adding yet another toy to a toddler’s playroom: we’ll
play with it for a while, believing it’s the best thing ever — “I know it’s just
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