The archive of (zombie) you
Performed identity in the age of the digital archive, part 2: Google is your new bookshelf.
In “We’re all hiding behind Gorilla Glass,” I looked at how our migration from physical to digital archiving has affected the performance of self within the most intimate of spaces: our homes.
Later that day a coworker responded, “Maybe Google is the new bookshelf.”
Her phrasing was elegant, but to parse just what that means for digital natives and emigres, we have to add some detail: “Your Google SERP (search engine results page) is your new bookshelf.”
True. In the digital world, if I need to learn about you without the opportunity to speak with you, visit your home, I can simply Google you.A few letters tapped quickly into a text field conjure a host of links that surface you.
But not in the way the books on your old shelf did. The seamed spines of pulp paperbacks, the dog-eared pages where a stray phrase once caught your fascination, the half-torn dust jackets, the scribbled, now-incomprehensible margin notes — they never spoke directly of you. Seeing these books I scanned a name, a title, a publishing house; I paused a moment on the visual details that might imprint a time period; I might slip it slightly from its cohorts to check the cover; and all these things I cross-referenced with my own knowledge, searching for a feel, a scent of the book. Whatever I dredged up spoke not of you directly, but of your tendencies and affectations — and I had to infer these things.
Whatever I learned here was a sign of you, an echo of your voice imprinted on physical objects, stamped there indelibly, transforming this object from a mass-produced one into a singular, irreproducible thing.
Now instead I might turn to the universal search bar, maybe even bother to visit Google.com. And from there I type the key of your name and open a hallway of doors.
Each door here is nearly visually identical. Here and there the fragments or the whole of your name flare up into bold, a line of content replaces the page’s metadata. If you’re on Google Plus I might see your thumbnail, a bit of biographical or even contact info. A filmstrip of images might appear above all the text.
Scrolling down this corridor I decide to click based on the signs on each door. They give me hints of what I might find within each room, perhaps even give me the paint on the walls (I see a Facebook link and I know at least what the decor will be). I pick one and now I see not you, precisely, or even your imprint upon physical media, but an avatar of you. There’s your picture at the page’s head; the spine of a timeline stitches together moments you’ve chosen to “share.” A ghost body riddled with points of insertion, nodes where I can dive deeper, learn more.
I’ve entered a kind of haunted house, an irregularly updated, otherwise static version of you. Slowly accreting more and more of you all the time, shoring up its verisimilitude.
—
There’s your picture at the page’s head; the spine of a timeline stitches together moments you’ve chosen to “share.” A ghost body riddled with points of insertion, nodes where I can dive deeper, learn more.
—
In other words: this is you. Directly. More akin to the person with whom “conversation flowed or went staccato, shutter-stopped, as I embarked on my survey” of your physical home than the braille I fingered on your books and CD cases.
Where once “I had to let you know I didn’t intend to consume you as passive subject,” I am now doing exactly that. I’m viewing a self you have constructed as conscientiously as you once composed your bookshelves, but now I’m viewing moments, not artifacts. Pictures of the last party you went to; the panoramas from your recent trip up Mt. Diablo or to Sonoma; a random thought you just wanted to share with the world. What was once a single framed photo of a smiling family has exploded into galleries. The amount of text you’ve poured into Facebook could have made a novel. (Not necessarily a good or valuable one, to be sure, but a novel nonetheless.)
In time, biography will be the art of sewing together multiple digital traces into a single coherent weave; in other words, an art we can practice ourselves today. There are already tools to do this.
If I wanted, I could write the novel of you out of the stuff of this new, unconstructed library of you. But I’d have to revise it tomorrow, and the next day.
But is that so different from the you I’d tour in your own home?
Perhaps not. There too, beyond even the media I focused on in “We’re all hiding …”, are a multitude of signs of you — prints, photos, artworks — things you “curated” to provide an at-a-glance index of you.
But how richer, at that first glance, were your corridor, your doorways with their wooden faces unmarked by clues to what’s inside. You didn’t make them, but over time they’ve been infused by you.
In time, biography will be the art of sewing together multiple digital traces into a single coherent weave; in other words, an art we can practice ourselves today. There are already tools to do this.
This new digital performance — this melange of content where you wax on life, review restaurants, post photos either artsy or of food or places, where you buy stuff and get irked with it, where you listen to music and share your “collection” with friends — is no less rich, but it’s of another register. No longer does every object in your home bear mute testimony — at least until that moment you or I speak about it. In your digital home everything comes with a little description pinned on, like a note from a mother to her little boy’s teacher affixed to his t-shirt. And that note isn’t static; always in flux, it serves up reflections of my search, hunting down your name to wrap it up in the context of frozen conversations, the ephemeral fixed, recoverable in bits.
In this new archive of you we move from homogeneity to heterogeneity. The flatness of the SERP explodes fractally, offering up a movable feast of entry points. Inserting my proxy finger into that opening, I dig up a you once consigned to the oblivion of the past. It’s no immortal you, but a zombie you, myriad dead pasts all shuffling witlessly, changelessly along.
Until your next update.
