The Virtual Is All You Could Desire.

In a really thought provoking review of six new books on our digital times, Edward Mendelson in the New York Review of Books (6/22), on how the smartphone (and the internet and related phenomena) have radically altered our relations to others, and most importantly, to ourselves.  While the topics vary, and the tone as well, from celebratory to dire, what is clear is that at least the perception of ourselves, an our place in the world - however that is conceived - has changed radically since the smart phone's rapid ascendance as the mediator of our daily lives. "For the first time" Mendelson writes about December 2010, when (according to him) smartphone presence achieved critical mass, "practically anyone could be found and intruded upon, not only at some fixed address at home or at work, but everywhere and at all times." Given that description, you wonder why anyone would want such blanket surveillance. He continues: "Before this, everyone could expect, in the course of the day, some time at least in which to be left alone, unobserved, unsustained and unburdened by public or familial roles. That era now came to an and." True enough, though I'm not sure what kind of family he hails from, or has brought up on his own. This is something that I have made a personal almost credo of - do not be a slave to the phone. Ignore it, don't download apps, let people know that their surveillance doesn't work.  This is not so troubling: what Mendelson proposes later is something that digs far deeper, into the psyche and consciousness of contemporary society. And I quote again: "The explicit common themes of these books is the newly public world in which practically everyone's lives are newly accessible and offered for display. The less explicit theme [and this is the important stuff] is a newly pervasive, permeable, and transient sense of self, in which much of the experience, feeling and emotion that used to exist within the confines of the self, in intimate relations, and in tangible unchanging objects - what William James called the 'material self' - has migrated to the phone, to the digital 'cloud,' and to the shape-shifting judgement of the crowd."

The end result - your apps and Google Cloud have more power over defining you than your actions do. The representation of you in cyber-space is far more real than "you" could ever be. As many suicides from on-line bullying have show, the virtual can be far more powerful than our lone voices.