Life and Lives in Bits
Our life generates a shadow made of bits. This shadow is getting bigger and more detailed as time goes by, accompanying every moment of our existence.
Even emotions can generate bits and therefore can be stored. This expansion of the digital shadow is not matched by a significant use and exploitation. By far we live in the present and we are not using this “track record”. This is going to change significantly in the near future with an explosion of services leveraging on that shadow. We might use it to remember things from the past, near or remote, to adapt services to our experience and personal context.
This shadow is just one among billions that are, all together, a fuzzy mirror of our social behaviour.
We are going to see, as well, an explosion of services leveraging on the information, on the bits contained in millions of shadows (sets that change depending on the intended goal of the analyses), to create other bits providing a statistical interpretation of phenomenon and individual behaviour whose meaning goes beyond and it is independent of any specific individual.
The single shadow today is a patchwork of information gathered by several channels and “owned” by different entities, in most cases independent of the legitimate owner, the one whose life is recorded. Today, the tiles making up the patchwork are floating around with no connection one another, therefore this patchwork is just a virtual concept and as such cannot support a comprehensive view of the shadow and the creation of services. The actors are not playing in a common ecosystem, actually this ecosystem does not exist today although it would be in anyone interest to become a reality.
The same is true for the set of shadows, of lives, that are not visible today in a holistic view and therefore hampers the development of services.
The technologies that make the digitalization of our life and our lives possible are evolving as their application (just think about the diffusion of video surveillance cameras). At the same time we see an increase of capabilities in those technologies that support neutralization of data, statistical analyses and interpretation do complex systems.
The pervasively diffusion of telecommunications and the growing density of bandwidth support information sharing to a point it was undreamed of just a few years ago. Over this evolution looms the spectre of the Big Brother that has to be exorcised through value generation clearly perceived by the individual and society as well as the absolute guarantee and trust in the preservation of the individuality of each person (privacy and beyond).
How will the ecosystem of digital life take shape and how will it result in the convergence of the various tiles composing the patchwork in a single shadow? How will the ecosystem of digital lives come into existence? What will be the typology of information that can be used as platform to generate services? How can individuality of the person be guaranteed in all its facets? How will it be possible to share and attach value both to the individual owner and to the society ownership?
