Knowing how way

So, yeah, we seem to have been abruptly transported from Baltimore to some spot distinctly north of Edmonton: for the past week, we've only poked our heads above freezing once, and falling veils of snow have been about as frequent as brief bursts of sun. The wind chill tonight is forecast to be around -18, and buckling straps or undoing Cleo's car seat often requires some hand blowing, where it might have been unthinking just ten days ago. But that didn't prevent us from having a relatively nice weekend. Indeed, we had good reason to move Cleo's car seat, as L. organized a trip with friends to the Visionary Art Museum, and also took Cleo to a JHU women's basketball game, to Bonjour, our neighborhood French bakery, and to swelling, bustling Harbor East. As a result of her creativity and energy, I had time to do some real reading, and read both avidly and widely: from Plutarch's life of Pericles, for instance, to a portion of Sherry Turkle's widely discussed Alone Together.

Turkle's book is certainly interesting, and provocative: deeply concerned about our increasing reliance on robotics, and troubled by what she sees as a further corrosive reliance upon hand-held technologies, she offers something of a manifesto, in which she documents the shifting behaviors of American teens and yearns for what she terms authenticity. But of course that term is problematic, and in fact many of her assertions, while memorable, seem to unravel when placed under even slight pressure.

Take, for instance, Turkle's claim that "The digital is only ephemeral if you don't take the time to make it permanent." The sentence appears in a section of the book that describes her rediscovery of a series of letters that she wrote to, and received from, her mother when in college: a real treasure, argues Turkle, of the sort that will simply evaporate in this era of texts and Tweets. On one level, I concur: there is an obvious and abiding beauty in documents composed in the past, especially if they involve handwritten sentiments. At the same time, though, her plaintive tone seems almost naive. After all, it's clear that digital data quickly forms a record in its own right: I've talked to two lawyers who have had clients exonerated due to their passive digital traces, and you've probably read stories about Facebook walls that prove troublingly durable, rather than evanescent. Indeed, embarrassing circulated JPGs and video files are constantly reminding us of the potential inevitable permanence of digital data. Remember Romney, speaking in what he thought was an unrecorded setting about the 47 percent? Savvy citizens of the digital world usually assume, unlike Turkle, that they are always being recorded - not that they have to take the time to record themselves.

At the same time, though, there are the complex ethical questions that surround any attempt to record life. Turkle admits to occasionally snapping surreptitious screen shots of her daughter as they converse on Skype - but, in so doing, she's arguably violating a basic principle of recording. The core issue has long interested photographers and musicians, but is now more generally applicable: do we have a right to record, without the consent of a subject, his or her actions? This blog, of course, isn't the place in which to answer such an issue, but it's clear that many people feel less nostalgic, and more ambivalent, than Turkle does about the potential value of creating lasting records. Even as we sense that we are likely being filmed by security cameras, and even as we know that our movements are being recorded by cell phone towers, we can still forge a personal ethic that moves beyond a merely self-interested series of stolen photos.

Again, this blog is not really an appropriate forum for such a discussion. But in one sense, of course, it is also the perfect exemplum of the quandary in which we now find ourselves. Closer to Turkle than to Cleo in age, I've done exactly what she is recommending, in fashioning this blog: it's the result of time invested, with the partial goal of rendering the transient permanent. (Indeed, over the years L. has given me five hardbound volumes of posts from this blog: standing on the bookshelf, they form a resolute proof of our interest in permanence). And yet, at the same time I worry about the lack of Cleo's consent in all of this. Will she mind, someday, that her childhood habits and comings and goings were made potentially permanent, or globally visible? Or will she, like Turkle, leaf through the books with a warm sense of appreciation and nostalgia?

I don't know. Perhaps both. Which feels appropriate today, as the momentary sun looks down on snow that has covered our city for days, but that will eventually give way, inevitably, to a greater warmth and to a basic law: the fact, that is, that everything, viewed broadly, is transient.