SUMMARY: Digital things go wrong, causing personality disorder. Are today’s malfunctions worse than before? I call this state of un-well-ness “digital identity disorder”.
DETAILS:
With all the excitement about digital identity (see, for example, Digital ID World’s definition), I wanted to describe a more low-key variant: namely, that which gets lost when your digital world becomes broken or bug-riddled. Consider the following (true) scenario:
- My desktop computer at work has been upgraded, and is now both slower and suffers from unreachable web pages that clearly exist, but not always, and not in a replicable way
- My laptop has been upgraded, and now can’t drive an external projector, plus a few other display anomalies; the hardware manufacturer pleads ignorance, and online advice is thin.
- My internet connection at home suffered a bizarre breakdown in service due to ‘rotted wiring underground’ (now fixed).
- My home computer, even with up-to-date anti-virus software and a good firewall, suffers from spyware and browser hijackings
- My PDA, since upgrading the synch software, has a permantly-empty contacts list
- My wireless setup at home no longer ‘passes through’ the connections from my wireless hi-fi (that’s right, hi-fi, not wi-fi) that I use as a high-quality infinite jukebox
- Having migrated this blog last week, certain (but not all) ported entries wreak havock on RSS aggregators, typically because of the inclusion of non-standard characters such as ’smart quotes’ (as opposed to the ‘dumb quotes’ used in this sentence) — this in 2004, yet! Oh, and the URLs have changed too — I could fix that, but have run out of time and patience.
- Having personally overseen the largest wi-fi broadband schools network setup in the UK (about 7 years ago), I find that due to a quirk of history I’ll be the last person in the UK to actually get broadband at home.
- I’m forevor running out of hard disk space, everywhere — despite fairly regular purchases of ‘ample’ space/hardware
- Email overload has become a double-bind: too overwhelming in volume to read, even scanning quickly, too full of possible importance to ignore. And those auto-deleted spam-filtered items? Well, I once did a quick analysis on 5000 trashed items over a one-year period: only one falsely trashed item… not too bad, but still anxiety-provoking.
- … there’s more… but read on…
OK… you get the picture. So what? Surely this is indicitave of one sad geek-wannabe, since a true geek would have fixed everything, and a non geek would just not have cared, or not been painted into such a corner, right? Besides, what’s the big deal: there are a lot more problems in this world than lost blog entries, spam, and buggy operating systems, right?
Well, I’m not comparing this to real troubles in the world. Instead, I want to make a point about how our identities can become dangerously wrapped up in a digital quagmire. Sure, there have been many proclamations about us all becoming a bit too wedded to the technology, but my feeling now is that our dependency is at a dangerous inflection-point. Once one gets in too deep, disruptions are extremely disconcerting. We have limited patience for fixing/editing/debugging, which over a certain period of time can be enthralling, but over a longer period can become downright soul-destroying.
Robert Pirsig argued many years ago, in the well-known Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, for the benefits to personal well-being that ensue from a level-headed approach to the challenges of debugging [this is a gross over-simplification, but not a bad encapsulation for the purposes of this posting]. But today’s software environments are chamelions tantamount to Pirsig’s (protagonist’s) motorcycle switching from petrol-power to electric-power to nuclear-power to something-unheard-of every 2 or 3 years. Worse, the switchovers happen at the precise moment when a real dependency has developed.
I’ve seen people lose their hard drives: pretty bad. I’ve seen people lose their email passwords with no recovery possible: pretty bad. I’ve seen people lose all their blog postings: pretty bad. But what is it that’s actually so bad? In a nutshell, an increasing portion of one’s identity becomes tied up in digital artifacts, and when these go haywire, it becomes extremely unnerving. When the number of things going haywire exceeds a certain threshold, we get downright grumpy. In fact, I’ve observed the same problems among definite non-geeks who have become overwhelmed with the increasing pace at which digital artifacts (including emails) are thrown at them.
The upshot is that I’ve been rather grumpy for about a week, as all these problems combined and compounded one another. The lesson is clear: time to step back for a bit. I naturally need some of the technology to do the bits and pieces for some papers I’m writing and presentations I’m preparing, but I’ve decided that actually no, I do not need most of it, so I’m going bypass some of the debugging for a few weeks, let the buggy systems languish for a while and deal with them next month.
I’m certain that I can ultimately deal with the problems, because I always have. The resources are certainly ‘out there’, and here in KMi, for solving them — but ‘out there’ is precisely one of the problems: the internet is an invaluable resource for helping me repair problems that I wouldn’t have had in the first place if my life weren’t so damn, well, digital.
Unfortunately, older versions of .NET will try to parse the configuration file, not understand the new setting, and throw an error back at us.
