Warhol was wrong. In the future, everyone won’t be famous for 15 minutes. If we are lucky, we’ll be anonymous for 15 minutes.
As Juan Enriquez shares in an insightful and provocative 6-minute TED talk (posted below) all of us are being plastered with “electronic tattoos” as our Facebook posts, Tweets and even our physical features and movements are being constantly recorded and uploaded to the Internet where they are forming a sort of digital immortality.
This issue, however, is getting even more complicated because some of the world’s future citizens are now being “tattooed” before they are even out of the womb–in the form of embryonic genetic screening.
The technology has obvious positive attributions but, in the wrong hands, it could also be exploited for nefarious purposes.
The same thing is true for many aspects of our digital identity. There are plenty of benefits to recording and storing many aspects of our lives, but there is a also darker side.
I don’t have an answer to this question, so I’d like to throw out to you: How do we wisely balance the benefits of continuous and pervasive identification with the benefits of anonymity?
