Colin Marchon Explores Our Technological Identity Crises With An Excellent Web Series

Colin Marchon, who currently attends Tisch School of the Arts at New York University for Film and Television Production, has produced an excellent documentary series : Our Technological Identity Crises. The series consists of three short, but very powerful videos :

The videos are short, each one coming in at around five minutes and they are all absolutely fascinating to me. As this blog is largely about virtual worlds I’m going to concentrate on Part 2, but all three are relevant. Part 2 is a good pick though because it has a brief discussion about Second Life as well as aspects that are dear to Second Life users and beyond, terms of service and identity.

The video opens with Federico Pistono, author of Robots Will Steal Your Job But That’s Ok. Federico has a view on life that some will feel is a bit too extreme, he sees his time away from the keyboard not as being in real life, but as being AFK. This is an interesting thought but I find it a tad too technologically based to embrace it myself.

Then the video moves on to augmented reality and an important question arises, if digital representations are going to surround us in the future, what makes the world inside our computers and phones any less real than the physical world? The point here being, I think, that augmented reality will contain digital representations that will be considered more real than the worlds inside computers.

Francesca Ferrando, philosopher of the posthuman, adjunct at faculty at NYU then adds her thoughts. Francesca talks of how we can connect with millions of other people with a body of your own imagination. The body of your own imagination that Francesca is talking about is your avatar. There have been many discussions about how avatars are in many cases an extension of ourselves. Francesca then makes an interesting comment about Second Life :

I’m telling you the truth, the first time my avatar flew in Second Life, I had chills in my physical body.

An interesting perspective. The flight thing is interesting, I was never bowled over by flight in Second Life, but then again I had played games like City Of Heroes before I arrived. On the other hand, when Gene Roddenberry Junior visited Second Life, he was very impressed by the fact that his avatar could fly.

John Havens, author of hacking h(app)iness then weighs in with his thoughts on our data and what he terms contracts of adhesion. What he’s talking about here is terms of service, which in some cases can be thirty or forty pages long. This is followed by John Cheney-Lippold, Professor of American Studies at University of Michaigan, Ann Arbor who makes a very interesting point about how terms of service can give people the impression of ownership, rather than the reality of ownership. In this case he’s talking about Google but the point is relevant to many other sites and places.

Many people take their virtual identity from one place to another, but who really owns the data linked to the identity? This is an interesting question that has arisen many times in the past and will no doubt raise its head many times in the future too.

Then we get to privacy, or more to the point, the lack of. Wendell Wallach, bioethic scholar at Yale University says :

This generation doesn’t care about privacy that much, my generation did.

This is interesting because when it comes to a lot of online privacy debates, I’ve observed that older people seem more concerned about privacy. Younger people, who have grown up in an era when handing over your information to all and sundry is the norm, find the arguments of us older folk regarding online privacy a bit silly. However, the older folk are right on this one, trust me! Whereas younger people may not feel there’s much a chance of it happening, Wallach makes a point regarding privacy that is behind the thinking of many of us who think privacy is important, as he addresses interviewer Colin Marchon :

Maybe privacy doesn’t matter anymore, but I wonder if in twenty or thirty years, there will be some incident, or crisis that happened that make your generation, what shall I say, fearful because you gave up your privacy.

Colin Marchon ends this part of his series by talking about fair rights over our digital selves and objects. There have been many discussions about avatar rights in the past, some people find them rather offputting or unimportant but as our lives are surrounded and immersed in more and more digital data, it’s going to become ever more important that our data and our identities are treated with fair use and that’s going to mean our powerful overlords making compromises to the current terms they ask us to adhere to.

Part 2  of Colin Marchon’s series is the one that resonated most with me, however all three of these videos are worth watching, I found them fascinating and on his website there are more in depth interviews with the people featured in the videos. The interview videos are longer but if you have the time to watch them, they are very interesting too.


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