Lucky Cloud, Your Sky

My father sent me this article this morning, from the New York Times Magazine about those who grow up not knowing a time before facebook. The author, Peggy Orenstein, seems to place a fundamental divide between those who didn’t grow up with it and those who have–she seems to think that those under the age of 25 have no past (no pre-facebook past, that is) to look back on, that facebook will fundamentally change the way that young people grow up.

Yes, I think to a certain extent, this is true. At least that many don’t really have a truly pre-facebook past to look back on. Yes, we are probably growing up differently than her generation. The pitfalls of being a child, of growing into an adult are different: as Liz Lemon notes, there are way more things for a guy not to call you on now. However, this is not better or worse, only different. The landscape Orenstein lays out is from the perspective of someone who does not accept the technology as a matter of fact, but as a generational quirk, something for the kids, the way many generations seem to view the new:

Six of my nieces will head off to college over the next several years. Some have been Facebooking since middle school. Even as they leave home, then, they will hang onto that “home” button. That’s hard for me to imagine. As a survivor of the postage-stamp era, college was my big chance to doff the roles in my family and community that I had outgrown, to reinvent myself, to get busy with the embarrassing, exciting, muddy, wonderful work of creating an adult identity. Can you really do that with your 450 closest friends watching, all tweeting to affirm ad nauseam your present self?

Fear of technology, of change, is endemic to all gaps between generations–she seems to want to question whether or not the new changes in technology are positive or negative, as if it were possible to simply return to a time before facebook or myspace when no one had any of their photos or information published on the internet. But it’s just the way it is. Since my life straddles the pre- and post-facebook landscape, I can say that it is true, it can be remarkably messy to drag an internet trail behind you, messier than simply being able to leave. A physical absence no longer means true absence, every person who has an iphone in their pocket can be triangulated and tacked-down.

It might be harder to escape your past, but this fact might present an opportunity for the consideration of a basic lesson: physically escaping the evidence or location of your past in person does not mean escaping your past. As Orenstein ably observes, Faulkner would love facebook, the haunting evidence of our undead pasts. It reminds us that simply because the past was once hidden, does not mean it was gone. I think my generation and the next will likely have to be more comfortable with their pasts, with seeing records of the radical breaks and cuts that one must make in growing up. We will learn, maybe more than the past generations, that a person is not identical to itself across time. We will learn, maybe, that one doesn’t need to leave their past to make a radical break, to grow up, to continue becoming different.

And to the idea of the entireties of our lives being encoded, digitized and indexed by facebook, google, etc. I think this idea, implicit in the article as a sort of neo-luddite critique rather than an ethical or political one, is reactionary. It reminds me of the articles people wrote when the cassette tape first became a viable commercial medium–terrified that it would kill the radio. If people could record songs whenever they wanted to, what’s to keep them listening to the radio? Or buying records for that matter? To fear or criticize the digitization of lives is a pointless and impossible task. Energy could be better spent fostering a greater critical engagement with the effects, ethics and politics of this digitization, rather than simply raging against change we fear.

The anatomy of a polaroid pack

Digitization cannot replace our memories. To take a picture is not to record a moment, to post on facebook is not to archive that moment. A photograph is not a memory. It is a suspension, a willful suspension. Our lives, in a very real way, exceed our attempts to record them, a photograph or a video is framed, our lives are not. Our sensory, spatial, and temporal experience exceeds any attempt to encode or capture it. This is all to say: our lives, even though they appear to be recorded, are still much richer and noisier, more complex and variegated than any recording would or could ever indicate. And furthermore, there is still a great deal of life lived off the internet, and that can never be put on the internet no matter how much we attempt to record. Our lives will always exceed our recordings of it. A recording is no more than a trace.

The important thing is to examine the ways that this recording affects our memories of real experience. It doesn’t kill or replace our memories, it interacts with them, it operates as a new item introduced into an already complex and dynamic system of remembering. Our memories still work in ways that supplant and alter physical evidence. To remember something is to recreate it. Insofar as memories are never strictly factual, the recording of facts or visual evidence is rather irrelevant to the process of real memory. I agree we should be critical of the system, we should pay attention to it. But people talk about this technology as if it were something that could be changed–this is not the case. They worry, their children live it is as if it were the way it had always been. It will be the same for us and our children, too.

It’s not simply better or worse, necessarily, just different. Not a thing to worry about, though certainly something we should be paying attention to.