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What Does It Mean To Live Our Entire Lives Under Digital Surveillance?

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We live in a world in which our every word and action is recorded and preserved for perpetuity by myriad companies across the globe. Whether we post a video sharing our day with the world or whether some random stranger on the street decides to publicize a moment of our life paparazzi-style, our lives are increasingly being digitized, publicized and traded for profit. A child of the digital era will have their life broadcast to the world from their first ultrasound to the day they die. As they grow up, every precious moment is likely documented in triplicate and shared by their parents. As they embark upon their early moments of independence, their unfiltered thoughts will be shared to the world #nofilter. What does it mean to live in a world in which we have a better historical record of a typical college student’s Friday night out than we do of the entire Roman Empire?

In a quaint era once upon a time we lived out our lives in the physical world, venturing into the digital domain for brief adventures. Mediated through the cartoon sounds of dialup modems, the first of the digital generations grew up as children of two eras: beginning their digital lives in the offline standalone world of iconic machines like the Apple IIE and IBM desktops and midway through their childhood leaping into those thrilling early days of modern cyberspace with its dialup soundtrack. Today the online and offline worlds have become indistinguishable as our always-connected smartphones mean we are never disconnected from the web even as we and others digitize our lives in realtime into the digital domain.

Every embarrassing moment of our childhood is lived out not in the privacy of our homes with friends and families, but rather broadcast to the world in realtime through social media, preserved for posterity to haunt us as we reach adolescence. Instead of a few precious photographs documenting a handful of firsts, our entire lives are captured almost moment by moment in a sort of dystopian reality television.

The effectively infinite storage of the digital world and frictionless capture of smartphone cameras means a parent today need not feel at all out of place capturing a handful of photographs of their child every single day. Indeed, my own friends and neighbors with young children gleefully scroll through galleries of hundreds or even thousands of photographs per month, documenting their offspring’s every waking moment in an almost Truman Show-like reality documentary.

In the film era photography was expensive, meaning most children had to suffice with a few dozen photographs per year to document their life, if they were lucky. Today’s children might generate that many photos over breakfast.

It is impossible to understate the impact of the smartphone camera, mobile data and limitless cloud storage. Gone are the days when a parent might spend several minutes posing their children and picking just the perfect lighting and framing to get that one shot. Today quantity rules over quality. Instead of that single perfect photo to be printed and framed over the fireplace, why not take hundreds of photographs per day, reality television style? After all, with that many photos there’s bound to be at least one that’s good enough to post to the world on social media.

The rise of social media has transformed an entire generation into reality television stars, groomed from birth to fixate on what total strangers on the other side of the globe think of their photos and writings. It is disheartening when friends and neighbors lament to me how their teenage children are glued to their phones 24/7, rechecking the number of likes their latest post received every few minutes and entering into a depression when a post doesn’t go viral or get the stamp of approval from someone they like. Children that in a previous age would have been reading books, focusing on school or hanging out with friends are instead living out their lives online, caring more what a stranger on a different continent thinks of their latest selfie than how their friends next door are doing. We’re training our children to be addicted to fame, to seek approval from strangers and to do anything it takes to win acknowledgement from the planet at large and that a failure to get the shallow attention of others is a mark of failure, reality television style. Gone is that gradual progression of maturation where children interacted with family, then neighborhood friends, then local friends, all the way up to finally arriving at college or the workforce. Instead they are placed on display to the world from birth and turned loose to seek the attention of the world at an age they can barely understand who they are.

Parents who try to protect their children from this world often end up facing a losing battle. Those that succeed may find their children ostracized and outcasts for not being a part of the natural adolescent social order.

Beyond the immense impacts on self-esteem and psychological wellbeing, an emerging impact of this rush to adulthood can be seen as the first generation of these children apply to college and enter the workforce. Writings they made years ago as young children, when they could not possibly comprehend the societal issues they were flippantly commenting on as elementary or middle schoolers are now resurfacing and blacklisting them. A single burst of tweets sent by a middle schooler trying to look cool in front of their friends might be long forgotten for years until discovered by an employer, leading to a dream job being rescinded and potentially even being blacklisting from the field.

Of course, the early MySpace generation discovered this same phenomena as they embarked upon the transition to college and the workforce, as long ago posts resurfaced. I recall quite vividly in college being amazed at how richly friends and acquaintances detailed their nights out on Facebook as the platform reached our campus. Every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night was accompanied with a deluge of posts documenting every moment. Suggestions by myself and others that perhaps that wasn’t the best idea and that employers might not be as impressed with their evening exploits were met with jeers and protestations that Facebook was for friends, it was a college student-only zone, no adults allowed.

Sadly, even in those early days, some found that companies were already hiring student spies on their campuses to send friend requests and to rifle through the Facebook accounts of potential hires to decide whether they were a good choice.

Perhaps the most frightening element of this dystopian reality television world is that the social media and other platforms into which all of this data is being deposited are not merely passive content hosts. Rather, they are actively mining and profiling their users, building enormously rich and ever-more detailed dossiers that can not only predict everything from an individual’s sexual orientation to their political leanings, but make all of that information available to advertisers, data brokers and myriad other companies to buy and sell at will.

What happens to the adolescent who is just beginning to discover their voice and unique independent personality when they stumble onto Facebook's advertising categories for their account that have precisely pinpointed every possible attribute of their existence, from their beliefs and interests to their sexual orientation? Will they be aghast at the privacy violation or treat the experience like algorithmic fate charting out their entire future?

Putting this all together, in the end we live today in a world in which our every word and action is recorded and preserved for perpetuity by myriad companies across the globe, while our children chase approval from total strangers on the other side of the planet and algorithms profile and guide us towards products, services and beliefs they think will best suit us. It seems we have set ourselves on a course to a dystopian world where fame is everything, algorithms rule all and the route to success in life is to put yourself out there in the giant global reality television show that is rapidly becoming our modern life.