Through the ages we have been puzzled by the complexity of our own mind. Along with that, came the fundamental questions about the origin and purpose of our existence in the universe. As the age progresses from stone to digital and our lives become more and more digitalized, the questions remain, but the realm expanded from material to virtual.
I stumbled upon this question as I was watching The Social Network. Although the story maybe fictional, I was blown away by how Mark Zuckerberg (the character almost robotically and brilliantly played by Jesse Eisenberg) transformed the idea of self-obsession into a socially accepted form of defining oneself through one’s social circle.
In virtual universe, we were ideas, and when we started to input ourselves in source codes, we became an entity. Code by code, we began to have an online presence and started to materialize in binaries. Our data grew as we fed more and more of ourselves into our online persona and our new environment “adjusted” accordingly to accommodate us. As our interactions intensify, we learned to get used to and discovered other inhabitants of the World Wide Web.
A person’s Internet chronological age, in my opinion, started when somebody began to get acquainted to the Internet. So, the Internet is full of relatively “young” citizen who are treading the web lightly to live harmoniously. In Internet chronological age, I should be very young, only a teenager. As an adolescent in this brave new world, I think I am entitled to feel a little lost and to have the strong urge to identify myself with a certain (peer) group. Luckily, the triple-w provides the information centre for all questions known to humanity: google search. And, with the introduction of anonymity, I no longer hesitate on joining a certain group with similar interest. But the existential question remains upon realizing the obscurity of my existence in both real and virtual world: who in the World Wide Web am I?
I am a citizen of no country with a social strata defined only to the extent of photo tagging and status updates. I don’t spend my time in forums and chat rooms (but I know people who do), and that only shows that I don’t have a social life. I’m linked to various social media but I just omit my presence and change providers when I feel like they can no longer accommodate me or they just got old. I have lived and died involuntarily along with the rise and fall of different social media with a trace of documentation maybe somewhere in another continent. In short, every time I ask the question, I am back to the beginning of the creation of my online presence: I am a cluster of source codes.
Maybe that’s what Mark Zuckerberg saw when he came up with the idea of Facebook: we are a wealth of data that are willing to voluntarily write our own codes in order to give shape, size, color, and voice to our virtual entities. Then, naturally, comes the interactions, and, voilá, we are a profile page (with pictures!). Perhaps the appropriate existential question for the digital universe should be: What is my algorithm?
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Cockaigne 