Vancouver International Digital Festival

Losing My Mythology to the Social Machine

Guest poster Wil Arndt (www.mod7.com and www.wilarndt.com) waxes philosophic on the meaning of memory in a digital world.

Oh, I know what you’re thinking: “not another post about Social Media”. Let me assure you, this is no ode to the greatness of Facebook. More like the ravings of a grumpy old man.

I have a problem. I think it’s unique to people like me, but then again maybe not. My problem is this: it’s getting harder and harder to lose track of anyone I know or have known. That’s right—lose track. I’ll attempt to explain.

For people who are born, raised, married, and living in the same small town all their lives, perhaps this problem of mine isn’t all too alien a predicament. But I’ve always been a nomad. Growing up, my family never stayed in one place more than four years (and that one four year stretch seemed like a world-record). And even though I’ve kept in touch with some key people throughout my life, I’ve had plenty of opportunity to hit the reset button. Start over. Try things differently. Break the continuity.

As the years and distances have slowly pushed my experiences into the chambers of mental antiquity, people from my previous “lives” became archetypes of my own personal mythology. Before the dawn of man in my mind, predating the dinosaurs, seemingly as primal as the creation of the foundations of the universe, these morality characters were woven into the fabric of who I was. This was possible, because, like James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, these people never aged, never died, and they always retained the same, comforting one-dimensional aspect.

There’s the grade-school sweetheart whose heart I inadvertently broke when I was a dumb kid. There’s the über-cool teenage dishwasher at my first job that showed me the “secret” of cool-hood when I was fourteen. I can’t forget the neighbourhood bully that forced me to listen to Def Leppard and concur on their extreme awesomeness (or deliver unto me a royal beating… what can I say: I was spineless). And I remember (with certain thankfulness at my own sensibility and level-headedness) that mysterious, somewhat “older” woman who, when I was fifteen, nearly… err, well, never mind.

Tempered by age, worn clean and meaningful by reflection and remembrance, I create the story of “me” and place these events and people into the roots of my life story. They are the lead actors in the stories and parables which have served me well at dinner parties and other events where I can pull out the “reminds me of…” story to illustrate a point. I can edit and omit where necessary in order to sculpt these people into the bronzed relief friezes commemorating the personal dramas and battles against evils that have defined my personal history.

But now, all of the sudden: Google, Facebook, Classmates, Reunion.com, MySpace, Twitter and the Internet-at-large come along. Suddenly, it’s easy to communicate with people around the world, broadcast my doings, and imprint my odd online legacy. Suddenly, I’m quantified and compressed, tending to push my thoughts towards performance rather than completion.

Thinking in excerpts and exposition.

I am codifying what I reveal about myself as bullet points, headings, subheadings and strategic (or not so strategic) blurbs. But, most of all, I feel that all this is compressing the timeline of my life, stripping away the unresolved mysteries and, with it, the myth of my recollections.

Pan-global-social-friend-net-poking is creating closure where I may not want or need any.

The machine does not forget. It sees all in perfect clarity. It presents everything to me when I want it. For centuries, science and technology has pushed back the shadow— banishing gods, monsters, flat Earths, primal elements, home remedies, magic, and tooth decay. Now one of the last frontiers of mystery—subjective human experience—seems to be recompiling, revealing logical precision where before there was a filtered acquiescence, or, if you were lucky, rational deduction.

Thanks to social networking applications, I can find and connect with many folks from my past (and, more often the case, vice versa). Seems like everyone is on the internet these days, and everyone is trying to get in touch with me through some social app. And thanks to Google Maps, no place is secret, sacred, hidden or lost. No longer is that first-grade trip to the Franklin Institute a formative odyssey within the pantheon of the ages, nor is the scene of my first car accident an icy, misty, mysterious, forest road—I’ve found the spot on Google Maps. It’s cool to be able to do it, for sure, but a little deflating.

Then there’s the special, hidden, aged tree in the farmer’s field underneath which I proposed to my love. That used to be lost in a haze of euphoria. But I’ve found it again; I can see it from a satellite. I think I can still see the indent my knee made.

This predicament, like so many things these days, seems quite unparalleled in the history of history. Instant updates. Stories that never end. Mystery solved.

That humorous cocktail-party story about my embarrassing coming of age can now be fact-checked by Googling and perhaps contacting the person or persons in it. That mysterious older woman, formerly so alluring and exotic, has four kids, a pool and lives next to my old elementary school. And now, I can find out that the cool dishwasher has become a pudgy, balding, sad little man who drives a Pinto. Well, at least he’s still a dishwasher. I guess some things don’t change.

Sure, transparency, facts and accuracy might seem important to you, if you care about such inane frivolities as “Truth” and “reality”. But maybe I’m not interested in dissolving all my illusions.

Some things are best left un-Twittered.