This is a very sad post below, but its also quite frightening. A man, a Weblogs Inc Blogger was hit by a bus and identified when police officers called Apple to reconcile his serial number from his iPod.
Is this where we are at? Have be really been so focused on the panoptic gaze of our paranoid government to such an extent that we have forgotten that every single piece of datum conveying device in the end, if it “talks” is personally identifiable when reconciled againt the mechanisms that give it voice?
Are we really nothing but an iPod, a cell phone IMEI, a Facebook account, some passwords and an IP address?
I often wonder what my legacy on the planet will be. It used to be that history was synchronic, temporal and real. Meaning: the things from the past were relegated to the past by their aging in the future. Paper disintegrated, things were lost, relics destroyed. Not so much anymore. The relics of my past are as accessible as the relics of my future, and their very historicity (a Deluze term I believe) gets destroyed as soon as the last-modified date gets wiped out when I look at the file.
Suddenly my High School English essay is as current as today, when its prose is not. My life is neither current nor historical and everything in the end is lost without purpose unless context gives it such.
When I go, and I hope its in many, many decades, I’ll leave behind me terabytes of music I liked, photos I took, probably HD video of my kids, grand kids, great grand kids, pets and my wife. I’ll have days of video, weeks of music, a hundred thousand photos.
I sincerely hope though that my iPod is not my means of identification. I’d like, in the end, to be more than a serial number.
[From Lost Bloggers ]
Comments 4
Or, rather than view this as being reduced to a number, instead focus on the fact that this man apparently left his house without any ID and if not for his iPod and Apple’s assistance he would STILL be unidentified and his family would still be wondering on his whereabouts.
Granted, technology is in increasingly pervasive and dehumanizing to a point, but 20 years ago this man would have had a Walkman and this kind of identification would not have been possible.
Posted 11 Sep 2007 at 10:59 am ¶Given, but is the pocket-sized panopticon really a progressive move? Humanizing even?
Posted 12 Sep 2007 at 6:47 am ¶Progressive? Yes. Humanizing? No.
Posted 12 Sep 2007 at 2:20 pm ¶But I think in this use (or regarging technology) ‘progressive’ and ‘humanizing’ are mutually exclusive. Name a time in history where ‘progress’ was seen as bringing people together on a human level. Even today with the vast number of social tools it’s still all digital and at times anonymous. I don’t think you can ask for and have all the digital toys you do and then decry them as ‘dehumanizing.’ With the enormous number of people, products, services, etc. out there, they simply can’t refer to you and acknowledge you as ‘Ethan’. It’s your family, you friends, and your co-workers that do that. They’re what ‘humanize’ you in the face of ‘progress.’
And the internet can’t take that away.
Gifts that do a world of good!
Posted 21 Dec 2007 at 9:17 pm ¶Christmas Gifts - Postcards
We send personalized cards for you!
Post a Comment