The day I disappeared

I was surprised at how upset I was to wake up on Tuesday morning and find I no longer existed.

Of course, I hadn’t disappeared altogether, but it was the case that after several happy, trouble-free years, my Facebook profile had quite similarly vanished out of sight.

At first, I was completely oblivious to my fate.  However, when friends began to write to me, asking whether I had ‘un-friended’ them, I became suspicious that something was wrong.

And sure enough, I was nowhere to be seen.

My sister summed up my predicament perfectly: ‘I am beginning to think that you have gone into a crack in the wall, like on Doctor Who, because when I looked for you there was no reference to you anywhere.  It is like you had never existed.’

I googled myself in a search for clues.  The regular suspects – my various namesakes around the globe – seemed unaffected.  The young guy always sitting next to the swimming pool, from who-knows-where; the north of England travelling Evangelist and distant family member who looks uncannily like my late grandfather; and the doppelgänger who never shares any information about himself, apart from a profile picture of a mouse in a pin-striped waistcoat – as far as I could tell, they were all updating and doing fine.

Unlike me.

For the entire day, I was restricted to my offline world; limited to meeting people that I could actually see and, in place of status updates, forced to ask people things like ‘How’s it going?’ or ‘Any news?’.

And I have to say, it all felt more than a little odd to know that there was a world being lived out there that I no longer had any connection to; a story, where I was no longer playing my part.

Of course, I might be overstating the point.  Like it or not, though, some of us are getting pretty used to the fact that we are part of a digital identity revolution; a revolution in which ‘what we say about ourselves’ and ‘what others say about us’ occurs in various online, non transferable silos.

And if you want confirmation of where this is all going, check out the following keynote presentation by Dick Hardt, Founder and CEO of Sxip Identity.

Hardt’s point is simple.  The Internet has come to dominate the way people keep in touch and share information, but it has also fractured digital life - turning people into a piecemeal collection of user names, passwords, and online personas.  The future, by comparison, is one in which we will be able to bring together these pieces of our story once and for all – and, above all, keep control of what is rightfully ours.

Late on Tuesday night, after what had felt like an age, I returned to ‘life’ without warning or notification.  It felt good to be back; good to know that this part of my story had not been permanently deleted by a server technician, somewhere on the other side of the planet. 

It did make me think, however, if one of the existential questions of the Internet age is ‘Who am I on Facebook?’, then we ought also perhaps start asking ourselves, ‘Who am I without Facebook?’

Comments

[olga guy]

By pure coincidence I was asking myself the same question about people ‘living’ on facebook

Facebook is a crazy phenomenon of our digital world, it easily becomes ‘soul book’ or ‘identity book’

Life becomes really virtual, question is: what is real life then?

When I was 12 or 13 I read Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles: science fiction stories about a virtual world… it was strange and sometimes horrible but so far from reality, now I think it’s already reality

Any way, the most Real thing in this world is our Imagination…