Identity lost or Identity gained ?

Having lived like a nomad for the last few decades, the feeling of belonging is often lost and the borders seem to have blurred significantly in terms of our behavior, our values and our thinking overall. There are times when distinctions such as culture, gender, color, nationalities seem pointless and like I have stated in one of my previous blogs, the human need to identify oneself through differences seem frivolous. The more I meet people from different backgrounds the more I find them similar in the core. Sure, cultures, nationalities, accents and looks differ and these aspects do have an effect on relationships. However, it appears that a new bubble of community is formed under this category of people, which we can categorize as the nomadic or the hippies of the new world. In other words, they are the "Expatriates”.

During many farewell dinners with many friends from this bubble of expatriates we have discussed the perils of re-integration that are required for those returning back home. Sometimes happy but more often nervous to be able to adapt to the very same world where they were born and brought up. In a foreign land these same people tried so hard to maintain their identities from home and once back home they find it difficult to adjust to what they once called home.

Ironic as it appears, the transformations of human ideologies with reference to place and environment is natural. Our instinct to adapt to our habitat has been ingrained through evolution. Stepping away from our home countries and cultures brings new perspectives to our outlook, open us to new ideas and points of views. Living as an expatriate broadens our horizons of the range of possibilities of living your life. This makes it difficult for us to go back to our own home countries and fit in. Many of us do go back and like to be close to our own but once an expatriate always the odd one out. I have heard many Swedish friends tell me how out of place they feel coming back to Sweden after their long haul abroad, many Americans are nervous to be back home and many Indians who are back in India but are always looking for cross cultural communities. The sense of a reverse culture shock is a growing phenomenon. 

Should we call this a loss of identity or gaining a more heterogeneous identity? Have we stepped out of the comfort of our widely perceived nationalities or have we stepped into the comfort of the new global citizen ? Our children are growing up in mixed communities that speak many languages, have different hair, eye and skin coloring and perhaps have contrary cultural beliefs. Do these differences make them more tolerant toward each other or will it generate more prejudice ? Will such a multiple exposure to communities and countries make them see the world as a single entity or will they begin to segregate it. Will this international cult of children turn into Aliens, Intellectuals, Visionaries or Freaks ? Is this world ready to embrace differences or generate further divides ?

It remains to be seen which direction our future generations will take as currently the world  ideology looks a bit confusing to me. The post war liberalism has forgotten its lessons already and reverted to conservationism. India’s much proclaimed post war secularism has turned into a traditionalist by banning ‘beef' for its citizens. The making of the European Union embraced globalization and yet the referendum in Britain resulted into the Brexit. Just a few years ago USA welcomed a colored President and now it speaks of creating hostile walls bordering Mexico. If this world is going to take one step forward and two backwards it will be a long time before our children can feel at ease with their new forms of identity.

The world appears to be standing at the crossroads of deciding its own identity, a humanity  that breeds through love and a cohesive progress or a humanity that is segregated through the disparity of hate and conflict.

Facebook: The Reality of Fiction

I have been a Facebook (FB) user since 2007. Having lived in far away places from friends and family, FB became a tool to show and tell. My daughter has almost grown up on FB, videos and pictures of her first steps, her moods, her Christmas, Diwali and Halloween costumes, her school performances, her pets, her hairstyles, places she has been to and her friends have all been shared with my family who lives two continents away. We are grateful to have such media tools available to us to keep us in touch with the lives of our near and dear ones. Facebook has also helped me connect with long lost friends from the neighborhood, from the early school days, from the ones that drifted away from college and colleagues from the various companies and countries we worked in. I am a peoples person and I like to see and hear about people I know, on Facebook I enjoy the occasional virtual overview of my family and friends. Facebook has enjoyed the patronage of such sentiments and grown to an active user base of over two billion as of 2017 figures.

I often receive notifications from Facebook reminding me of my memories, my friendships and sometimes the gestures are heartwarming when FB makes lovely videos to celebrate these memories. Now, with a population of over two billion users it is naive to think these gestures of good will are personally handled by humans. Zuckerberg in fact takes great pride in how advanced and state of the art their systems are that he presented his Facebook vision of around the clock augmented reality with sensors, camera, and chips embedded in clothing, everyday objects, and eventually the human body. So, I can safely assume that the lovely videos which almost seem tailor-made for me are the work of astute algorithms which are programmed to take the feed from my wall posts and design the pre-formatted animated videos.  In one such memory reminder, the video acknowledged my four year old friendship with a Danish friend, the algorithm promptly displayed a white animated figure embracing a brown animated figure.

On the one hand, I appreciate the precision of the algorithm to grasp such a detail and on the other hand I am spooked out about so much precision. This got me comparing the real world scenarios with virtual scenarios. Surely, we give away more information than we intend to through social interactions in the real world however in the virtual world such information is archived and can be retrieved for or against your will without any emotional obligation.

We have been warned by security technologist Bruce Schneier that, “Facebook can predict race, personality, sexual orientation, political ideology, relationship status, and drug use on the basis of ‘Like’ clicks alone. The company knows you’re engaged before you announce it, and gay before you come out and its postings may reveal that to other people without your knowledge or permission. Depending on the country you live in, that could merely be a major personal embarrassment or it could get you killed.”

Besides how the users of Facebook or any other social media may feel at a personal level, Cambridge Analytica has shown us the horrors of political misuse of Big Data and the extent of manipulation it is capable of. Facebook has compromised personal data of 87 million of its users in the United States of America to manipulate the electorate, so how different is this real life trepidation from the story of the Black Mirror episode, “The Waldo Movement” (2013) where a cartoon character takes over the country leading it to a state of anarchy.

The next few decades of human computer interaction enters its most radical phase as the world is poised to slowly transition in the age of calm technology (Weiser,1988) wherein devices will disappear and a digital layer envelops us in our day to day lives. Currently we are choosing to post our pictures on FB and Instagram or express our thoughts through Twitter. Shortly, information may be grasped about us by just being in any digital environment. The prediction is that as we plunge into this third paradigm of the ubiquitous matrix of media and communication, our near future digital lives will be spinning off exponential more intimate data (Nardi et.al., 1999). We have seen the precision with which algorithms can customize and design desired outputs. We have seen how successfully  Cambridge Analytica has managed to analyze Big Data and manipulate the elections in USA. It is only a matter of time before Artificial Intelligence starts to predict the sub conscious patterns of human behavior and the fictional story of “Her” (2013) becomes a reality. 

A large part of FB users may still be oblivious to how their privacy is compromised, but let us not be complacent to the possibility of horrors that the advancement of technology can bring.