NO, WAIT, STOP LOOKING AT ME!

In yet another glimpse at the fascinating inevitable convergence (i.e. ‘head-on car wreck’) of technology and personal identity, Microsoft recently announced the release of its miniscule auto-snapping Vicon™ camera, capable of being worn on a necklace and documenting up to 6 days of moment-to-moment daily life and interactions.

The device, which was originally designed for more altruistic purposes of Alzheimer’s patient support, will reportedly soon be available to the consumer market—though for what purposes one can only imagine. Indeed, apart from the obvious issue it raises of who in the world could be so interesting as to watch for days at a time, it offers a more interesting observation altogether on an emerging sort of ‘author-consumer’ conflict  that the whole social-media environment continues to illustrate.

That is: a person who at one moment rails against retail sales clerks asking for their address to complete a simple cash purchase, or cries foul at customer service departments for soliciting participation in a survey at the end of a crappy phone call with some $3 per hour drone in Bangalore, and then the next runs home or pulls out their phone to foist every pedestrian, mundane detail and image of their lives into the public sphere.

So what gives? How do we reconcile the two? By understanding them as actually very different, even antithetical things. Not as apples-to-apples behaviors but rather a distinct cause and effect: one is a collective cultural force, the other a set of sterile technical practices that precipitated it.

It’s increasingly apparent that, at heart, the ‘new’ social media phenomenon is really driven by a very old innate need for identity and recognition—for some small proof that we still actually matter—only now on steroids in response to an increasingly vast, impersonal, disconnected world bent on starving it. It is a movement born less of technology, than as a sort of rebuttal to it and the ways it was being employed to invade our privacy by governments and corporations: essentially blunting their power to intrude by exposing ourselves (or the parts we choose) first. 

Similar to the way that racial epithets are co-opted by an aggrieved group to defuse their impact, our new exhibitionism and self-fascination are ultimately direct, natural human responses to the devaluation and even indignity inflicted by most interactions or experiences today. Meaning that posting some fish-eyed photo of my visit to the bank teller is less about me personally than my ability to turn the tables and starring role on the world, and then boast about it. The act empowers me, if only in some small way.

So, what then are we to make of Microsoft’s newest ‘life caching’ device? If you accept my totally unverifiable reasoning here, quite simply this: that social media is increasingly revealing itself as less a ‘technological’ trend, as initially thought, than a sociological one. It is a trend rooted more in the neuroses, appetites and human hard-wiring of psychology than in the circuitry of the phones, PDAs and laptops that facilitate it. The tools change, the disc storage grows, and the components shrink. But the behavior and its causes are as simple as elementary school playgrounds, and about as likely to change much until the world ever does. 

The camera, in short, is a mildly intriguing novelty, one of many to come. Why we want or need it at all is the far bigger and more interesting story.