I read this article on Ted Kaczynski's theories on the negative aspects of technology several days ago. My interest in the article is not the moral implications of listening to the ideas of a convicted mass murderer, but on Kaczynski's idea that technology is changing the way that we view ourselves and the world. I am interested in such a question because for me 2012 has so far been a year of questioning. I am 28 years old this year and there has never been a time where I have been more unsure about my place. I am a Filipino woman living in Canada and encouraged and privileged in my education that I was able to study what I want. Despite growing up in the Philippines, when I moved to North America I became a part of the generation the Western press now call Millennials. Our defining characteristic is that we were made to think that the world was our oyster, that we could accomplish anything through our newfangled tools called Facebook and Twitter. But when we graduated we entered an uncertain world. Our reality is a global recession, a state of constant political crisis, and most importantly, a planet on the verge of an ecological tipping point leading to devastating and irreversible effects. And despite all our technological gadgets, we feel powerless and afraid.
When I was an undergraduate, I chose to study the Philippines and my people within a U.S. university. When I graduated and moved back to Canada I was fortunate enough to find a community of young Filipino Canadians who were concerned with representing their Filipino heritage positively. Now, the third stage of my development as a 20-something combines both of these. I am situated within the academic and artistic communities of Filipinos in the diaspora. And faced with the task of transforming possibilities into actualities, I am busy with the task of exploring where best to situate myself. Using my knowledge of self and my hybrid identities, I often go into bouts of questioning on a variety of subjects. Everything is fair game: what to do for a living, what to write my thesis on, my spirituality, my sexuality, what language I should think in, whether I should move to the Philippines or stay in Canada. And more often than not, these ungroundings occur in conversation with people, and on my Facebook page. Which leads us back to the beginning of this essay. Facebook is going through a lot of controversy, a lot of it having to do with their protean privacy terms. Since I joined the site, I have become more of a mind exhibitionist, representing myself in all of my identity-seeking glory. In the past, I was able to be a furtive mind exhibitionist under Livejournal aliases. Now I have become manifest to all of my Facebook contacts. And like it or not, Facebook plays a big role in my identity development. Which makes me feel utterly fragile, the company being so totally untrustworthy in terms of how they handle my information. All my paranoia about being discovered and revealed is concentrated on it. It's as if I have surrendered a big part of my power to control how people from various aspects of my life see me. Totally unfair of me to portray Facebook as some malevolent Big Brother, but then they make it so easy... Have you noticed how much I have been talking about Facebook as if it were an extension of myself? On the one hand, it makes sense that I talk about it so much, since the topic of my post is how much I have invested in my FB persona. But on the other, a part of me is able to distance myself and critique the totalizing effect of this technology on the way I think about myself. It's an addiction, really. I spend a lot of my time on the site. I get my ideas about the world from articles posted by my FB contacts (people as well as organizations). I share ideas about the world to my FB contacts. I do all sorts of things on it. Once I finish this post, I am going to link it on FB. It's like FB has coopted both the means as well as the ends. I'm kind of scared by how little resistance I have to it. No wonder that article on Kaczynski's ideas is so memorable to me. His extremist stance seems to be a stable counter to my FB addiction. "Halt," he seems to say, "do you even understand the full implications of a Facebook-facilitated journey of self-discovery?"
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Words, images, & fripperies by Christine Balmes unless otherwise stated. Archives
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