Unforgettable: Maria Bustillos' article Not Fade Away

Thanks to the fantastic walllace-l listserv I was recently made aware of Maria Bustillos' excellent article Not fade away: on living, dying, and the digital afterlife. 

There's a bunch of good stuff in this article but the aspect of memory and online activity is really interesting to me. "When someone dies nowadays, we are liable to return to find that person's digital self — his blog, say, or his Flickr, tumblr or Facebook‐entirely unchanged. I knew a young man who passed away suddenly last October. His Facebook page/wall became a digital memorial and people have continued to post photos and remembrances to it as recently as today. Until Facebook takes it down or it is removed for other reasons, it is likely to stay available, almost infinitely. The same technology that can get people fired for posting "inappropriate", however defined, images/video/text, in its unforgetting also, as Bustillos points out, does not forget the dead. There is no relief to be found in the forgetfulness of human memory in regards to a individual's online presences unless steps are deliberately taken to remove that presence. (Even the way we talk about being online, as being a "presence", suggests a false physicality or even a projection of "a second self". See Sherry Turkle.) Corey Doctorow has made the point of creating a means of access for all of his online accounts as part of his will so that his data and his body will be accessible by his loved ones upon death. Online content is a loop that is started the first time one logs in and posts something, anything. That rendering of code  as text, video,blog post will then remain for as long as the server/ISP/browser/Wayback Machine recognizes it. The loop continues on. If you'd like to add to it, great, but the original content doesn't get tarnished in the sunlight or faded with age. "Entropy is our enemy, but also our friend; it defines that part of us that is changing, coming into bloom and then, because we are mortal, fading." Entropy can not be seen in its inevitable progress online. There is no sense of time in the digital world. Once recorded, once captured we continue on. This is dangerous because it seems that we have no need for memory or that all memories can be committed to this much greater brain which does not suffer from Alzheimer's. Not to say that there are not advantages to this but the ability to forget and remember is a significant part of our humanity. It must not be forgotten however that to remember should be a conscious act, not merely a keyword search.

The Internet made me write this

The latest issue of Newsweek features an article entitled iCrazy: Panic. Depression. Psychosis. How Connection Addiction is rewiring our brains by Tony Dokoupil. Currently the whole article is available to read on the site.
My own reaction to this sort of thinking is mixed. On one hand it seems to fall into the general this-really-big-thing-is-really-bad-for-you while on the other, there may be some points to consider. There's probably a good chunk of truth to the fact that the way we think about life has been radically altered by the use of the Internet. Being "always on", to borrow the title of a 2008 book by Naomi Baron, surely has consequences. However, I hesitate, because correlation is not causation. Or to quote Baron "...as David Hume taught us long ago, constant conjunction has no necessary relationship to causation." (p. 227)
Additionally, discussion(s) of the Internet as a very large, disembodied entity that makes conscious decisions on its own, demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of what technology's role is. For an example from the Newsweek article: "But the research is now making it clear that the Internet is not “just” another delivery system. It is creating a whole new mental environment, a digital state of nature where the human mind becomes a spinning instrument panel, and few people will survive unscathed."
Please note words like "creating", "state of nature", "becomes" and "survive". While this article is decrying the brain rewiring work of the Internet it still speaks the language of technological determinism. To quote Baron again "The way we use a technology is always a joint product of the technology's affordances and of the cultural milieu in which it plays out." (p. 234) Jaron Lanier, for all his crankiness, makes this point throughout his book You are Not a Gadget.
The discussion of "the Internet" throughout the article is confusing. It seems to substitute for a discussion of social media rather than the wide breadth of activities that a full use of the medium of the Internet enables. I'm pretty sure no one is going crazy because they are reading too many articles from a library database, or at least no one is studying, or is interested, in those people. When Dokoupil mentions the Internet I would suggest he largely is referring to social media.
My biggest issue with this article is not the presentation of the Internet as a cause of anxiety, depression and psychosis. My issue with this article is its attempt to only present the Internet as a cause of anxiety, depression, etc. For example "And don’t kid yourself: the gap between an “Internet addict” and John Q. Public is thin to nonexistent. One of the early flags for addiction was spending more than 38 hours a week online." Dokoupil does not give any current flags for what defines "Internet addiction". Also one of the reasons that 38 hours a week seemed excessive was that typically the user was paying per hour. It was not only time, it was money that was being spent.
The Internet represents/offers a mass amount of people the ability to engage in repetitious, rote behavior that, either truly or falsely, offers a sense of connection. Sherry Turkle is right. We are alone together and changes in behavior are necessary. But to blame it all, or much, of it on Internet usage sees correlation without causation.

Sell this!

Have come across a couple of things over the past couple of days in thinking about the use of the Web/social networks and our relationship to them and each other.
First is this link as the article deals with self-perception, perception of others as sellers, the shift from being simply in relationships with others to having those relationships leveraged for numbers, as the writer of the article states, of LOL’s and likes that seem to determine some type of truth about individual as the poster or poseur as the case may be. Or at least the total number of clicks seem to grant some kind of meaning to us as users/people. I particularly like what this article says about the constant selling of ourselves. How does this effect our perception of ourselves or how does it cause us to want to generate other versions of ourselves which may or may not be actually true. Or we become so split managing our multiple “personalities” that any effort in deciding what is true gets subsumed to managing that personality/profile.
There's another way to talk about this which is captured nicely below via Sherry Turkle interview with Colbert. (While Colbert's style tends towards the aggressive, I think he's asking some of the right questions, it's not the right forum for Turkle to actually elucidate her thinking. But she gets in a couple of noteworthy points despite the chuckles.)
"We have lost respect that some argument do take the long form. Some arguments do take a book." And this idea of length and time is a grounding motif throughout the rest of her conversation with Colbert. In a somewhat serious question Colbert asks why not make this book about technology 140 characters long so people can absorb it. In particular Turkle suggest that in general people are "...begin[ing] to ask simpler questions so that they can give simpler answers because the volume and velocity [of the messages] ramps up..." More time is being spent on volume/speed than depth/marination. Turkle has a particularly resonant point with the article above toward the end of the interview in responding to Colbert's statement that aren't we all better connected and knowing each other because we are connected all the time through social media, like Facebook. Turkle nails it: "People are performing on their Facebook profile." And because we are constantly connected, Turkle suggests that there is actually performance exhaustion in needing to be constantly "on" in the several levels of meaning that word indicates. On= not missing. On=connected On=computer booted up On=that you are tweeting/facebook statusing interesting/likable items. On=stage. On=the constant public display of some true/false/half-true/half-false representation of ourselves as we desire to be seen and known. Not only do we have the opportunity to craft how others think about us but in crafting our online performance through a series of quotes there is the opportunity to craft how we think about ourselves which is probably not true.
Not only is there performance exhaustion but I wonder if there is not fear of being disconnected, of missing, of no longer being "on". Colbert, either purposefully or not, captures the standard response that any attempt to disconnect, albeit temporarily, or take a step back out of the information stream requires that individual to stop being on for a certain reflective period of time. If this performance idea is true, I think it is, then any attempt to reflect on this type of use also requires a break in performance or selling. There's the idea of having to selling a performance so that the dichotomy of sales and acting are not that far apart. If we are all simultaneously selling and acting towards each other, will we notice when actual communication and interaction stops? Or will we have committed so fully and so deeply to our own perceived roles to have sold ourselves to ourselves?

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Sherry Turkle
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive