A wise woman once said "Your pace in the race of life is defined by those whom you choose to run by." This quote really came to mind as I was reading Aaron Hess's article You Are What You Compute. This article brings to the forefront an issue that generations today don't even know they are facing. As Hess states we are "attached at the hip with our digital devices; we have become one with them." Even as I was reading this I received a text and absolutely could not stand to let it sit there and me not know what it said. We have talked a lot lately about where identity is found, online or offline, and Hess describes it perfectly in the term technological unconscious consubstantiality. This means simply that the relationship between humans, identity, and technology is not like a Venn Diagram but three parts that make a whole and cannot be separated. We are in fact defined by whom we choose to run the race beside, and for me a lot of the times its my technological devices.
Hess along with Mark Andrejevic, and Jan Fernback begin to talk about identity and personal information being something that is completely accessible to more than whom we choose to give it to. Andrejevic speaks of a world in which technology predicts our every movements, when to start the car, when I need a bus, even maybe when I am out of milk. Personally, this is immensely scary. I tend to be very private and let no one know certain details about my life, but if these details can be found through other details, what are we to do about it?
The final topic looked at by these authors is once again Identity, but one in which everything we say and type and search is logged and kept for reference. So if I look up something one time and Google logs it, then it begins to show me images and search results based on these one time log ins, what exactly is my identity? Am I really the person I choose to be and do I really like the things I like because I choose too, or is it all a fabrication and recreation of what the man behind the curtain tells me to?
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