Dual Identity

On the one hand there’s Facebook. Online. All the time. Allowing us to diarise our humdrum lives to other humdrum users.

With this comes online friends. Remote, unknown anonymous, perhaps not even real.

You talk to someone and they’re talking to someone else on their mobile at the same time or texting or reading something. We’re completely mixed up.

Then we have our solitude. Lonely, depressed individuals unable with little real contact with others.

Then there’s Cameron’s Big Society.

Our little gadgets allow us on the one hand to be connected with the WHOLE WORLD. And on the other hand, they make us solitary.

Do we want to be left alone or included? God only knows.

We like the idea of being in a community but can’t be bothered to invest in it. We like our gadgets but they don’t bring us any fulfilment. They don’t enrich us. Does all this mean we need two identities? And does technology provide us with that?

I live among neighbours. They know my name and roughly what I’m about. Same with me. But then I have an online identity. A different name, another profile usually (for privacy reasons) and much more outspoken. Aren’t we all the same?

Maybe Man has always needed that? Did Caveman go out hunting and then plaster his home walls with graffiti (paintings) when his family were out?

Early Man’s technology seemed to be based on a need to improve his life. I suppose we say the same about our fancy tools. They make life easier. Pah!

Did he too have a public identity and a private one? I don’t think so.

I think that the earth’s exploding population, the invasion in our lives of spying technology, our feelings of being increasingly insignificant make us want to be more than one person. The real one – the one that sits in front of the box and eats tortilla chips – and the virtual one which is a bit more shiny, has a more interesting life (4,000 Facebook friends – yay!) and has the possibility of being seen by the world.

I’m not on Facebook. Why? So friends I can’t be bothered to call or email can witness my busy life? Because that’s the only way people exist these days? Not a chance of me joining.

Public and private. We seem to still need the influence of other real people but maybe prefer to have things entirely our own way – contact when we want, opinions freely given and under a pseudonym, confirmation that we are here.

Maybe we’ve been working up to this all the time – a way of having people around but not really having much to do with them. From wheel to Twitter, it’s all so we can choose when to opt in and out of society.

For that reason I’m sceptical about the Big Society. That’s actually the problem. It’s already too bit – it covers the globe. We need different personas to cope. We need to make our societies smaller and then we’ll feel significant.

Maybe then texting while talking and Facebook and all the thousands of ways we can contribute to the media will diminish. Just a thought.

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