Our Digital Selves

February 5, 2015 - 9:46pm - by Alyson Shane

I'm watching Serial Experiments Lain which according to Wikipedia is an avant-garde anime from the 90's that explores ideas like identity, consciousness, reality and communication. 

I started watching it over a decade ago with my friend Eric, who also introduced me to Star Trek and Arnold Schwarzenegger movies and the film The Thing and the Fallout video game series. 

This was also around the time that I started blogging, back in the days of GeoCities and eventually LiveJournal and (sigh) DeadJournal which was about as emo as you can get. After that I moved onto Blogger where I stayed for several years and iterations of my blog and also of myself, and then to Wordpress, and now to the blog you see before you.

I've been living my life online for more than half of the time I've been alive, which is both fascinating and slightly terrifying.

It's weird to think that there are snippets of ourselves scattered around the internet, these little scraps of ourselves that we leave littered in comments or status updates or blog posts. 

Like a trail of breadcrumbs leading from our past to future selves. 

In an email the other day my aunt, bless her heart, said "I hope you aren't too personal online because it could come back and bite you in the future" which is true but there's also a level of curated-ness that goes into who we are online, at least most of the time.

We have to be careful of how we represent ourselves and what we say because those words stay with us forever. The internet never forgets. 

On the other hand we've been handed this near-limitless tool to share and communicate and store memories, which is what a blog is when you get right down to it.

"Weblog" - remember that word? I barely do. 

So we walk this weird tightrope using these various tools which allow us to we curate these finely-tuned versions of ourselves, masquerading as "authentic" and, for people like me, attempting to do so without over-sharing too many personal details that could damage us or those around us.

Because we still have secrets from the internet. At least, for now.

But will we be able to, in the future?

In Serial Experiments Lain a girl kills herself and claims that she is able to live on in the Wired, which is the show's version of the internet, because she uploaded her consciousness prior to her death. I remember thinking about that while reading an article a few years back that discussed a statement made by Google's Ray Kurzweil, who made the claim that we will be uploading our minds and essentially becoming digitally immortal. 

There's something about that idea that terrifies me and I don't know what.

Maybe it's the idea of losing my physical body.

Maybe it's the idea of bearing all of my consciousness to the digital world.

Maybe I'm just too attached to my analog existence

at least for the moment.