Reinventing ourselves

Reinventing ourselves
as we go through life is a natural part of human experience. It is what we do as we mature, encounter new circumstances, build new relationships laptop battery. It is an inherent part of the immigrant experience as one changes homes, learns new language, and internalizes new cultural norms. But such reinventions and transformations are not the exclusive domain of immigrants — we are all subject to them to a greater or lesser degree as a part Hp F2024B battery of living.

A key part of the process of reinvention of self is the acquisition of new reference points that serve to give us a sense of our new identity — new friendships, new relationships, new places. An equally important part of this process is the shedding of old Hp F2024A battery. This is what is so interesting about high school reunions. We realize that the people in the room who were so important to us during our teenager years, whose acceptance and approval defined so much how we thought about ourselves, matter so little to us twenty years later. Indeed, it is hard to believe they once mattered so much at all. They simply no longer serve as reference HP XH260 battery points to who we are today.

Almost ten years ago when doing research on technology and identity, my colleague Kathi Vian wrote: ”We create our identity through reference points. We know who we are in reference to others… Identity is a conception of self that we create based on various reference points in our life.” Meaning that we know we are tall because there are people around us who are shorter, we know we are smart because someone tells us we are, and we know we are shy or outgoing by comparing ourselves to those HP Pavilion N5200 battery around us.

What is interesting about the technology environment we live in is that for the first time in our human history we are able to create persistent and mirror-like references points of our lives that keep former identities in constant view. Videos and photographs taken from birth, snippets of life documented on Facebook, streams of thoughts on Twitter, inner wonderings revealed in laptop battery details blogs — these are all new reference points for creating and shaping our identities, our senses of self. And unlike previous reminders, often tucked away in shoe boxes, desk drawers, and attics, these are much more sensory-rich, pervasive, and easily accessible, to us and Hp Omnibook XE3 battery.

Sociologist Amitai Etzioni raises an alarm about existence of these persistent trails and reference points. In an article titled “Second Chances, Social Forgiveness, and the Internet” he writes:

By computerizing local public Hp 346970-001 battery records, the Internet casts the shadow of people’s past far and fast; like a curse they cannot undo, their records now follow them wherever they go. True, even in the good old days, arrest records, criminal sentences, bankruptcy filings, and even divorce records were public. Some were listed in blotters kept in police stations, others in courthouses; anyone who wished to take the trouble could go there and read them. But most people did not. Above all, there was no way for people in distant communities to find these damning facts without going to inordinate Hp HSTNN-DB02 battery lengths.

In the Internet era, in contrast, a person’s conviction of graffiti vandalism at age 19 will still be there at age 29 when he is a solid citizen trying to get a job and raise a family, and the conviction will be there for anyone to see. Same is potentially true for a high school prank captured on someone else’s Facebook page or Youtube channel. While this is of concern, I wonder if as a result of pervasiveness of such information we may actually see greater social forgiveness and Hp HSTNN-UB02 battery tolerance. After all, the more people see that even those they admire do stupid things once in a while, particularly when they are young, wouldn’t our tolerance level go up also? Laptop battery And hasn’t it happened already? The more we find out about personal indiscretions of various politicians and celebrities, the more inured the public has become, it seems. We are finding out that many of our heroes are fallible. Maybe, along with everything else, the Internet Hp DP390A battery is democratizing human fallacy.

What I do wonder about, however, is how will personal transformations be achieved in this era of persistent and vivid reference points from the past? I see these transformations as an integral and necessary part of going through life, a part of creating new selves as one matures, learns, and acquires new life experiences. What tools and practices will we develop to shed the old reference points as a part of such transformations? In other words, what is the new equivalent of the old shoebox or cobwebbed attic in the Internet Compaq PP2100 battery era?