The Internet and our Future Selves

Back in the salad days of my university years I was told by my professor and my advisor that I should take a weekend, get a bottle of scotch and read Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons, I still haven't done that, although I did try and read it once, and this might be the year when I do. Nevertheless I think his theory as described is highly relevant to our relationships in a digital world.

The theory itself is fairly abstract, which is why it requires the the intensity of a bottle of whiskey and a dedicated weekend, but in short he postulates on the notion of personal identify and morality. Morality is often defined in the term of relationship and how we ought to treat others. If you think about the harm principle as an example or even the golden rule, they are defined by how what is morally right in the context of relationship. It is predicated on the interactions of different people at the same time, but does not consider the interactions of the same person at different times;  Parfit considers these to be of equal importance and further if it is incumbent upon society to protect different people from harming one another, then it is also incumbent on society to protect the same person from harming future versions of themselves.

Heraclitus foreshadowed Parfit's theory by several thousand years when he suggested that we could never walk into the same river twice. Because the second time we step into the river we are a different person, we bring with us a new series of experiences and new identity. It's like reading a book or seeing a movie for the second time, it always has different meaning for us because we have a different subset of experiences.

So I realize that last two paragraphs are a bit of a mindfuck and has massive ideological implications, but I think there are interesting applications for this is the way we manage our day to day affairs. The crux of the matter is what is our responsibility to future versions of ourselves and how is that responsibility altered or compromised by the digital world where everything we do online has the potential to be recorded online for posterity.

The classic example of this that most of us have considered is the posting of a photo online that shows us in a compromising situation, drunk or doing something stupid and it being seen by co-workers, bosses, family members. The possible harm to careers, reputations, and relationships is manifest especially if the photo is taken out of context. This is the fear that if others post those photos, and conventional morality deals is equipped to deal with this; but what of the people who post those photos of themselves, not uncommon for the generation in their university years right now, who may be harming future versions of themselves, since they will unlikely be able to hide what has been posted online.  What is amusing today may not be so in 10 or 20 years.

In the past as people evolved they were able to leave their pasts behind them, to grow up and join the adult world, (now there is a crisis in North America of adulthood, but that's another post). They would reminisce with their close friends about those silly things they did back in the day, or even allow those things to be forgotten, with little fear that they would be confronted with them at some point in the future. Not so today, our lives are recorded for all to see, and though it is often an image (see my previous post, Whither the Shadow) it is still recorded digitally for the world to see.  This is particularly true even if we evolve our image. For example university kids often want to create an image of someone fun and sexy, versus serious and staid, as we advance in our lives that image may change and evolve, however because of the internet, it is much harder to shed an older image of ourselves.

There is a great story in the Bible where Jesus is rejected by the people in his hometown of Nazareth.

"I tell you the truth, he continued, no prophet is accepted in his hometown"

The reality for the people of Nazareth was the Jesus was just Jesus, that little boy they knew who was the son of Mary and Joseph and grew up in the neighbourhood. They could not fathom the man that he had become. The relevance for humanity of this story is how hard it can be to forge a new identity in one's hometown, it is challenging to rid oneself of one's baggage, of being the snotty nosed kid who used to kick the teacher and get suspended from school, to truly become new one must leave the place where he has come from

How much this is exacerbated as our hometown is now our network of Facebook pages and how much more difficult it is to form a new identity when our old identities are available on the internet for anyone to see, and recorded there for all time. Which brings me back to original point about the responsibility we have to our future selves and the care that must be taken of our present selves on the internet so as not to harm our future selves.

The problem is how can we know what will harm our future selves, and the risk is that constantly worrying about future versions of ourselves will render us hopelessly neurotic and incapable of making decisions. So we can apply the principle of reasonability and say what we should not do things that would harm a reasonable person, but even then, what may be harm for one, may not be for another. For me, not to write this blog was harming my future self, but writing this blog, may come back an haunt me one day. I don

I have to be honest I haven't figured this one out, I never promised I had answers here, but I think it raises a lot of important questions.  For me, not to write this blog was harming my future self, but writing this blog, may come back an haunt me one day. I don't know how to resolve this but I am intrigued by the question. I hope you are too.