TEDxSoMa

Digital Mirrors: Navigating Our Digital Reflections

Marina Gorbis, Institute for the Future

From the program: A native of Odessa, Ukraine, Marina is particularly suited to see things from a global perspective. She has directed international programs and led international development projects for SRI (formerly Stanford Research Institute) in China, Japan, Vietnam, India, and Eastern Europe. Marina has also authored publications on international business and economics, with an emphasis on regional innovation and competitiveness. In addition to serving as IFTF’s Executive Director, Marina led the Technology Horizons Program for several years, focusing on the innovation at the intersection of new technologies and social organization. She has initiated a Global Ethnographic Network (GEN), a multi-year ethnographic research program which tries to develop an understanding of daily lives of people in Brazil, Russia, India, China, and Silicon Valley, in an attempt to integrate their voices into IFTF’s forecasts. She has also led several major private client engagements at IFTF, the most recent being a global Science & Technology Forecast for the UK Government’s Department of Science & Technology. She holds an M.P.P. from the University of California, Berkeley, a certificate in international business from the University of London, and a B.A. in industrial psychology, also from the University of California, Berkeley.

Marina started the presentation with a somewhat whimsical future scenario. She walked us through a day of digital reflections: waking up in the morning, looking in the mirror, and having all her online vital statistics reflected back. If she didn’t sleep well, her social network could be alerted that she was likely to be in a bad mood. It could alert her that she’s weighing a bit more today and advise her to skip lunch. It cold alert her that her credit score has gone down — because she cancelled a bunch of credit cards — and advise her to take on more debt to rectify the situation. In short, not a happy way to start the day! She also described, in rhyme, how she could continue to get this sort of digital feedback throughout the day.

We’re creating many more digital reference points about who we are: our health, our financial health, our thoughts and feelings, and these are becoming our own digital mirrors. She’s been thinking about these notions of digital identities. Can you imagine what life was like before physical mirrors, when we had no visual reference points for who we are? She becamse fascinated with reading about the history of mirrors, and one of the many books she’s read on the subject is Mirror Mirror: A History of the Human Love Affair With Reflection, by Mark Pendergrast. Pendergrast says, “Throughout human history, mirrors appear as a means of self-knowledge and self-delusion. We have used the reflective surface both to reveal and to hide reality.”

With these digital mirrors, we can hide or mask our reality by programming our digital identity, the same way we use makeup and other tools in the analog world.

Another interesting thing about mirrors in history is that they were also used by “scryers” to divine the future and give advice. This is the same thing she was demonstrating in her intro — those digital reference points were giving advice based on the digital identity they were reflecting. Think about all the programs and applications running analytics on all this data, divining our future.

It’s interesting to think about those things, because in a way we’re all living in these glass houses where we’re surrounded by these digital mirrors. Are we in a stage where we’re creating our own generation of these scryers and taking something that’s really complex — us and our identity — and spinning stories about who we are, and these are becoming our new reference points. She hopes it will not happen.