Image by randal-schwartz via Flickr

In  Krapp’s Last Tape Samuel Beckett dramatizes a man minutes away from turning 69 talking with his younger selves through one of the audiotapes he records every year on his birthday, this one from 30 years ago. Set in “A late evening in the future” the back-and-forth between the older self and the recorded younger ones is a profound meditation on desire and self-deception, as well as on how memory both protects against and causes the unbearable losses life has us bear.

In a real-life version of Krapp’s experience of using recording technology to talk to earlier selves, David Pogue wrote a “From the Desk of…” piece yesterday about saving 15 years of family videotape from “data rot … the distressing tendency of our recordings and computer files to become inaccessible as it’s orphaned by new technology.”

After going to the Consumer Electronics Show last month and seeing only one videotape recorder displayed, he realized his massive cache of family movies lovingly recorded over 15 years would soon be unwatchable because no device would be available on which to watch. So, being the take-charge guy I’ve always found both affable and helpful, he took charge. With terabytes of hard-drive storage in hand he transferred all his videos there from tape. Along the way, his wife and kids would come to his office and watch whatever tape was in the process of being transferred.

Sounding very much like the younger Krapp describing moments of love, hope, and happiness the older character on stage can only feel by their absence, Pogue writes,

And what I discovered has nothing to do with technology, and everything to do with emotion, family and memory.

I’m telling you, these tapes are INCREDIBLE. My wife and children wander up to my attic office, spot whatever movie is currently importing, and they’re just goggle-eyed. We’d completely forgotten what we used to look like, how we used to talk. Our lives are so full, we barely recognize some of the places we’ve been and the experiences we’ve had.

My children shriek with glee at the old haircuts, the cute things they said when they were toddlers, the funny dances they used to do around the house. “Oh, I remember that!” my wife and I keep shouting. My youngest, who’s five, has had his mind blown by images of the family before he came along.

via From the Desk of David Pogue – Why We Make Home Videos – NYTimes.com.

Nicely described, I told you he was affable. Later he says,

Watching your past life is entertaining, yes, but it also makes you think, take stock, reach new conclusions about yourself and the way you live life, about the dynamic of your family and how it changes as each new child comes along.

via From the Desk of David Pogue – Why We Make Home Videos – NYTimes.com.

And then,

“The unexamined life is not worth living,” wrote Thoreau. And what I’ve learned from my video-transfer project is this: You can’t examine your life if you can’t remember it.

via From the Desk of David Pogue – Why We Make Home Videos – NYTimes.com.

But you don’t need a recording to remember. In fact, memory and recordings are fundamentally different. All memory is a complex act of meaning-making that takes into account what the current situation affords along with what has already been remembered and one’s desires for what comes next. We create memories from this moment-by-moment dynamic of past, present, and future. Memory is not at all like reading data from a videotape or hard drive, and equating remembering with watching a recording is a mistake.

What videos provide our remembering minds are retrieval cues, powerful retrieval cues that can bring back many lost details. But video can also short-circuit the operation of other quieter more subtle retrieval cues that just may be as meaningful as those provided by full-color stereophonic and eventually 3-D video.

For example, shared memories help hold families together because we hold different memories for each other, I remember this piece and you that piece. That’s what makes reminiscing such a powerfully intimate and creative experience. But when you have a video you don’t need each other. That remembering together strengthens intimate bonds raises lots of questions: Will the bonds in a family weaken when one’s autobiography gets built from increasingly available and powerfully salient technologically-mediated recordings rather than intimate reminiscence? Will we have access to more accurate personal “data” but less connection to each other? Will David Pogue’s children become old like Beckett’s Krapp wandering alone on stage bathing themselves in “data” from their personal past? I hope not, but, truth be told, I really don’t know.

How video-documented lives will play out 30 years from now when Pogue ages like Beckett’s Krapp is anybody’s guess. What we do know is having access to those recordings, and his children growing up in such well-recorded lives, is profoundly different than anything people have experienced up until now. Ignoring this difference is even more dangerous than leaving banana peels strewn about one’s study (if you’ve seen the play you know what I mean).

Image via Wikipedia

It used to be that if you were depressed you’d cry in front of the fire, lay around watching TV, or sit soaking-up suds at the bar around the corner.  But if you believe news reports about research out of Leeds University published in the journal Psychopathology today’s depressed are spending their time online.

The media has been all over this story: BBC News has a headline “‘Internet addiction’ linked to depression, says study,” Reuters shouts “Study links excessive Internet use to depression,”  Time magazine’s Health & Science blog trumpets “Too much time online linked with depression risk,” and the Daily Mail repeats the BBC headline while the UK Press Association opts for the pithy “Internet use linked to depression.”

The stories themselves state, for example, “(a) ‘dark side’ to the internet suggests a strong link between time spent surfing the web and depression, say psychologists.” (UKPA). Or that “(p)eople who spend a lot of time surfing the internet are more likely to show signs of depression, British scientists said on Wednesday.” (Reuters)

But don’t rush to take an Internet-break right now, nor do you need to do an intervention with that friend who just always seems to be on Facebook. First, the reported link is between depression and compulsive Internet-use, not Internet-use. Keep in mind that there is a link between compulsive hand washing and depression, but that is no reason to question normal hygene.

Second, and more important, the implications of the actual research are much less dire than the media response would suggest. Other than arguing the political point (yes, there are politics even in research!) that “Internet Addiction” should be included as a distinct disorder in the upcoming DSM V diagnostic manual, this research says nothing more alarming than depressed people will do depressing things even when they are online, like spend too much on “sexually gratifying websites, gaming websites and online community/chat websites” (Abstract: “The Relationship between Excessive Internet Use and Depression: A Questionnaire-Based Study of 1,319 Young People and Adults“)

So lets look at the actual research that has generated the media hysteria.

The researchers recruited subjects online using links to the research questionnaire placed on UK-based social networking sites. 1319 completed the questionnaire that surveyed patterns of Internet use and levels of depression. No data is provided about how many people viewed the questionnaire without replying, nor how many started but did not finish, but I think it safe to assume that many, many more people viewed the link than those who chose to participate. We have to ask who would choose to participate and are they a representative sample of the rest of us. Well, in this design only those already bored by or uninterested enough in what they were doing online would bother to take the time to participate. So right from the start we see the study is based on a highly biased and not a representative subject pool.

Moreover, if the researchers want to study people who are compulsive users of sex sites, gambling sites, and social networking sites why would they think these compulsive users would stop what they are compulsively drawn to do to complete a questionnaire. Won’t their method of an online questionnaire miss the very people they want to study? Rather than the people of interest, their research design pulls for people who spend lots of time online and are already sorta uninterested and bored (depressed?) by what they are doing. Of course, and I am not imputing any motive here, this group consists of  the very people who would support the researchers agenda of advocating for inclusion of the “Internet Addiction” diagnosis because the members of this group are already dissatisfied with what they are doing online (depressed?).

They found 18 users (1.2%) who showed a pattern of compulsive and excessive use of specific sites, but not so compulsive that they don’t mind an interruption. They called this group “Internet Addicted.” Out of the 1319 looking for something to do online they also found 18 normal users who were demographically similar to the “Internet Addicted” 18. They then compared them on how much time was spent online, what people did online, and how depressed they were.

Those 18 compulsive users not so addicted that they won’t interrupt their addiction for science did in fact spend more time online and were more depressed.

This is not surprising. Imagine an offline version. You leave a questionaire at a bar, a nice bar, a place people go to hang out and be with their friends and maybe meet some new friends. At any one time in this bar, lets say on any one night it holds 100 people, do you think it likely to find 1 or 2 people who drink way too much in bars, so much so that it interferes with their life? Do you think it likely they would also tend to be more depressed than other people at the bar? Would you be surprised by that? Would you then want to see headlines splashed that there is a link between bars and depression?

It would be really easy to sink deeper into snark (don’t get me started on the statistics they used). But I won’t because what I really want to do is make the point that we really do not know what our emerging culture of simulation is doing to us, either how it makes life better for some while for susceptible others going online becomes an occasion for suffering, isolation, and depression. But we really want to know. And we want to know now even though we don’t know, not yet. Change happens faster than research gets done. And media outlets just won’t plaster headlines announcing “Nothing Conclusive” or “We Still Don’t Know.”  And while this study deserved to be done, we need lots of data-points even to begin understanding what the tools we’ve made are doing to us, it did not deserve all the media attention it has received.

The broadcast premier of Frontline’s Digital Nation is 9 PM on Tuesday Feb.2. While I’m sure it is riveting TV, as web-content it is brilliant.

The “Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier” site has the full broadcast along with web-only content in sections titled “Living Faster,” Relationships,” Waging War,” Virtual Worlds,” and “Learning.” Here’s something from the intro to spark your curiosity:

In Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier, FRONTLINE presents an in-depth exploration of what it means to be human in a 21st-century digital world. Continuing a line of investigation she began with the 2008 FRONTLINE report Growing Up Online, award-winning producer Rachel Dretzin embarks on a journey to understand the implications of living in a world consumed by technology and the impact that this constant connectivity may have on future generations. “I’m amazed at the things my kids are able to do online, but I’m also a little bit panicked when I realize that no one seems to know where all this technology is taking us, or its long-term effects,” says Dretzin.

Joining Dretzin on this journey is commentator Douglas Rushkoff, a leading thinker and writer on the digital revolution — and one-time evangelist for technology’s positive impact. “In the early days of the Internet, it was easy for me to reassure people about what it would mean to bring digital technology into their lives,” says Rushkoff, who has authored 10 books on media, technology and culture. “Now I want to know whether or not we are tinkering with something more essential than we realize.”

via FRONTLINE: digital nation: introduction | PBS.

If you are still here instead of watching Digital Nation, let me try one more spark. The “Health & Healing” subsection of “Virtual Worlds” provides an intimate, close look at an Iraq war Vet being treated for PTSD with virtual reality based exposure therapy. Tinkering with the essential, as Rushkoff calls it, is often value-neutral, what we do with it–in this instance healing broken soldiers–makes all the difference. Digital Nation can help us understand what we are doing with all these new technologies, and what those uses might mean for us as individuals and a society.

Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife

When new technologies become widely adopted facts of life, like camera-enabled cell-phones, problems come from the wetware; the tools are blameless but people act irrationally and hurtfully. Consider sexting–taking and sending nude sexually explicit cell-phone pics–and an Indiana prosecutor so freaked out by networked adolescent sexuality that it caused him to respond in a logically incoherent manner, i.e., act like an idiot:

“I think there has always been a sort of, you show me yours and I’ll show you mine, and a curiosity there,” Porter County, Ind., Prosecutor Brian Gensel said. “The problem now is the stakes are so much higher because if a juvenile sends a picture of themselves to someone else, well, that can be disseminated now to the entire world within minutes.”

And that’s distribution of child pornography, Gensel said.

Last week, two middle school students in Valparaiso, Ind., were caught sending nude pictures of themselves to each other on their cell phones. The students were caught when the 13-year-old girl’s cell phone rang in class, and her teacher confiscated it, according to a police report. The girl cried that she would get in trouble because a 12-year-old boy sent her a “dirty picture.”

The boy sent the girl a picture of his genitals and requested that she do the same, the report said. The girl then texted him a picture of her naked, police said.

The students have been charged with child exploitation and possession of child pornography, both felonies. They were referred to the county’s juvenile probation department, which will determine whether authorities pursue or drop the charges, Gensel said. If convicted, the students could be required to register as sex offenders, he said.

via Sexting: Two middle school students charged with felonies – chicagotribune.com.

Felonies? Listed in sex offender registries?

You should I know I’m on the prudish (puritanical?) side of things when it comes to laws against child pornography. Maybe because of the work I do. I’m not sure, but when you’ve treated people in therapy who were sexually exploited as children you tend to end up either a bit jaded or with an almost visceral response to protect the victim in situations of sexual exploitation. Sometimes both.

But here? I just want to protect these kids from the prosecutor. Other than idiotic I don’t have a word for trying to ruin the lives of these two children just because they acted like children, other than maybe evil or criminal. In fact, the sexually exploiting actor here seems to be those who automatically put sexting into the criminal justice system.

Gensel’s response is psychologically  and logically incoherent. On one hand the prosecution says that there is a 13 year old girl and a 12 year old boy who need protection from the pornographic exploitation of sexting. They are victims of a criminal act because they and their cohort are too underdeveloped neurologically, emotionally, socially, and sexually to handle responsibly sexual decisions with long-term consequence. They need our protection, they are not fully responsible actors.

But as potential perps, well, that is a different story. The same two children are now fully responsible child pornographers who may end up with a life-defining requirement to register as sex offenders. When viewed as victims they are not fully responsible and capable of making decisions, but they are when viewed as criminals.

There is no crime here or in countless other similar situations, unless you share my sense that those prosecuting tech-enabled adolescent sexual curiosity may be crossing a still ill-defined line. But there is a huge educational issue, a need for “sexting education” more sophisticated than “‘just say no’ or you’ll be arrested for child pornography.”

Teens these days have to learn the ins-and-outs of two incredibly powerful interacting systems: their sexual bodies and their technological tools. Today’s adults have no first-hand experience contending with the challenges–and opportunities–today’s 13 year olds confront daily.  We need to acknowledge the reality of our ignorance and confront it rather than criminalizing hormone-poisoned youth who are on the front lines of our shared ignorance.

[Thanks to Jack Drescher for telling me about this case]

This is definitely one for the “no good deed goes unpunished” file. 20 months ago an Indiana woman had a fertilized egg implanted in her pharmacologically prepared uterus. But she had no intention of raising the child. Instead, she planned to be an aunt. The egg and sperm came from her sister and her sister’s husband. It was a loving, kind, and generous act.

But when the child was born the couple on the receiving end of this generosity ran into a problem,

(t)he couple – known as T.G. and V.G. in court records – then petitioned Porter County Circuit Court to have the genetic mother’s name on the child’s birth certificate. The surrogate, V.G.’s sister, filed an affidavit in support of their petition.

But the judge refused, ruling that “Indiana law does not permit a non-birth mother to establish maternity. Indiana law holds the birth mother is the legal maternal mother.

via Ind. court to decide in vitro baby’s legal mother – KansasCity.com.

The case was heard today by the Indiana Court of Appeals in a constitutional challenge to Indiana’s paternity laws. But unlike Solomon’s gambit of offering to split the child in half, everyone in this court wanted to find a way to respect the intentions of this family so that the genetic mother’s name would appear on the birth certificate. Rather than a protracted constitutional battle that could drag on for months,

(t)hey spent much of the 40-minute hearing trying to craft a simpler solution that could be used as a precedent.

“It seems to me that everyone’s singing the same song,” said Chief Judge John G. Baker. “We just want to make sure we’re in tune.”

via Ind. court to decide in vitro baby’s legal mother : 24 Hour Breaking News : The Buffalo News.

It is tempting to see this just as a situation in which the law lags behind technology. While clearly it is that as well, and the Indiana legislature needs to get its statutes and regulations up-to-date, this is also another example of technology leap-frogging so high and far over culture that we are left dizzy. The dilemmas faced by T.G. and V.G. are inevitable results that come from technologically separating “biological mother” from “birth mother.”

To illustrate those dilemmas consider egg donation, a situation that reverses the intentions of this Indiana couple. In egg donation the woman providing the genetic information (the “biological mother”) has no intention of being the mother. Instead, the gestational carrier (the “birth mother”) does.

If V.G. has maternal rights does that also mean that an egg donor should have a claim on the child who is born since that claim is identical to the one V.G. is making? Even if a “contract” is signed, should and egg donor be allowed to change her mind and assert maternal rights? Or what if the birth mother changes her mind and decides she does not want the child (unlikely I know, but when you work around reproductive medicine the unlikely is just tomorrow’s nightmare). Do maternal rights and obligations revert back to the original egg donor?

Egg donor or biological mother? Gestational surrogate or birth mother? Who is the intended parent and who will the child call mommy? Human intentions are what gives meaning to these new technologically-mediated possibilities. Judges and statutes need to be true to those intentions. But intentions are messy and inconsistent. Far messier than the consequences reproductive technologies magnify and concretize. We can move genetic information from person to person with much greater certainty than we can know what we want. I don’t think these dilemmas will ever be solved, not really.

We can’t put the genie back in the bottle, and who would want to if we could. Perhaps the best we can do while sitting with the inevitable legal (and human) riddles is take pleasure in the thought of an 11 year old Indiana boy happily playing with parents, and an aunt, who love him enough to put up with all this.