October 16, 2006
The Perils of 'Digital Double Vision'
A thought provoking article by the Jason Fry for The Wall Street Journal on how digital technology lets us chronicle our lives, but suggesting maybe we should be living them instead.
... "Last month, during a beach vacation, I caught myself flipping through pictures taken just minutes or hours before, with friends and family in the same room. I stopped, horrified, only to find myself doing the same thing the next night. How did I spend my vacation? In part, by reviewing that same vacation while it was in progress.
...Technologies tempt us to shift back and forth from living life to observing ourselves living it -- leading to a weirdly alienating self-consciousness.
... "The phenomenon of standing back and observing our lives is becoming more and more psychologically significant," says Sherry Turkle, an MIT professor who's the director of the school's Initiative on Technology and the Self.
"Part of living now, is setting up a set of parallel lives where we get to observe our externalizations of self," Dr. Turkle adds. "There can be a positive here -- if that leads to a new self-reflection. We see ourselves refracted in our lives on the screen; it gives us an opportunity to think about ourselves in a new way. But there is a downside: We become alienated from all of these 'second selves,' and feel emptied out by our multiple existences -- online lives that leave us, the physical us, lonely and alone at a screen."
The Permanent Link to this page is: http://www.textually.org/picturephoning/archives/2006/10/013827.htm