Don Quixote, Cervantes’ hero and great favourite of Borges, was an adventurer, explorer, pioneer and most of all, a fantasist. His story is a great one, surviving many generations. But his character would make very little sense today.

It is still possible to have adventures, to discover new places, and do great things, but it is now much more difficult to exaggerate those experiences in order to spin a good yarn. There is so much information in the public sphere that any and every claim can be verified, cross checked and challenged. Locations can be found on Google Maps and examined from the air. Eye-witness accounts can be sourced from the closest bloggers. Financial transactions are logged with global banking systems. Our faces are recorded on CCTV.

Our tales, and our life-stories, are no longer our own. Wherever we go, and whatever we do, we leave a data-trail behind us, which, if anyone cares enough to follow it, is writing our life story for us.

Autobiography is something that, typically, is only first considered in one’s twilight years, when the inevitability of death heightens the urge to leave some kind of posthumous personality imprint for the sake of one’s descendants. But for citizens of the 21st Century, there is no shortage of evidence of our time here, and if we were to leave it until the end of lives to attempt to construct our story, it will be too late. Because by that time it is already written.

We are carving our life stories via our data-trails. We are drawing our shapes on the face of the planet with the GPS psychogeography of our daily movements, tracked by the phone in our pocket. We write patterns with our money movements and express our tastes through the points earned on our loyalty cards. This is how our thoughts, opinions and emotions are recorded. This story, written in dry, explicit detail, is unlikely to correspond with the self image we carry in our heads, but it is irrefutable and permanent and will be how we are remembered. Unless we decide to do something about it.

One approach may be to attempt to remove your traces from the public record, or state your claim on every piece of data stored about you. But this would be a fools errand, and nigh on impossible. The more reasonable approach for the techno-savvy is to simply to write your own data trails, and write them LOUD, so that they are more obvious (i.e. more googlable) than any other data out there. Personalities are writ large on blogs, mySpace pages, Twitter streams, Facebook profiles, message boards and anywhere else data can be created in the public domain. This is what they call “user-generated content“, or what the ponses call “Web 2.0“. It may appear to some as a deep well of mindless chatter, but it is more than that. These are personalities, struggling to define their individuality in a world that has suddenly got very big.

The author and mathematician Rudy Rucker has a concept he calls the “Lifebox”, which is what he sees the blog evolving into. As we live our lives we fill our lifebox with content – images, words, video, audio – the more we add, the more accurate a simulacrum of the individual it becomes. After our death, if search software continues to evolve at the rate it has over the last ten years, it would be possible to converse with a lifebox just as you would another living being. Autobiography becomes a living construct, one to which we can ask questions, spend time with and get to know.

But even if we haven’t set out to build a lifebox, we are building one anyway. We can’t help but write our stories, just by being out there and interacting with the world. If there is more to us than just a string of financial transactions or public records, for the sake of posterity it is up to us to seize authorship and to own it.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 9th, 2008 at 2:01 pm and is filed under philosophy, society, tech, web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.