We live in a world in which our every word and action is recorded and preserved for perpetuity by myriad companies across the globe. Whether we post a video sharing our day with the world or whether some random stranger on the street decides to publicize a moment of our life paparazzi-style, our lives are increasingly being digitized, publicized and traded for profit. A child of the digital era will have their life broadcast to the world from their first ultrasound to the day they die. As they grow up, every precious moment is likely documented in triplicate and shared by their parents. As they embark upon their early moments of independence, their unfiltered thoughts will be shared to the world #nofilter. What does it mean to live in a world in which we have a better historical record of a typical college student’s Friday night out than we do of the entire Roman Empire?
In a quaint era once upon a time we lived out our lives in the physical world, venturing into the digital domain for brief adventures. Mediated through the cartoon sounds of dialup modems, the first of the digital generations grew up as children of two eras: beginning their digital lives in the offline standalone world of iconic machines like the Apple IIE and IBM desktops and midway through their childhood leaping into those thrilling early days of modern cyberspace with its dialup soundtrack. Today the online and offline worlds have become indistinguishable as our always-connected smartphones mean we are never disconnected from the web even as we and others digitize our lives in realtime into the digital domain.
Every embarrassing moment of our childhood is lived out not in the privacy of our homes with friends and families, but rather broadcast to the world in realtime through social media, preserved for posterity to haunt us as we reach adolescence. Instead of a few precious photographs documenting a handful of firsts, our entire lives are captured almost moment by moment in a sort of dystopian reality television.
The effectively infinite storage of the digital world and frictionless capture of smartphone cameras means a parent today need not feel at all out of place capturing a handful of photographs of their child every single day. Indeed, my own friends and neighbors with young children gleefully scroll through galleries of hundreds or even thousands of photographs per month, documenting their offspring’s every waking moment in an almost Truman Show-like reality documentary.
In the film era photography was expensive, meaning most children had to suffice with a few dozen photographs per year to document their life, if they were lucky. Today’s children might generate that many photos over breakfast.
Source: forbes.com
Author: Kalev Leetaru