Part of the challenge of living in the third decade of the 21st century is learning to adapt to the digital social algorithm. Whether dealing with information triage, working through era-defining moments, learning the relationship between past and present, or navigating radical uncertainty, our personal lives are wrapped up within a global pandemic and the deep immersion into digital life that allows us to continue in the absence of in-person social interaction.

But what are these digital spaces doing to our brains? Aaron Z. Lewis is curating The Digital Sensorium, a project that looks at how people are being changed by their online environment:

Thirty years into the digital age, it’s safe to say the internet isn’t just an external environment that we travel through or a “public space” that we stroll around in. It’s fully entangled with our nervous systems now, and it has re-shaped our minds in ways that aren’t always easy or comfortable to articulate. This process became even more apparent during 2020 — a year in which screens swallowed the last remaining bits of our “offline” culture and daily lives. I don’t think we’ll be able to create the sort of digital publics that the New_Public festival is aiming towards until we’ve adequately taken stock of what happens within us when we live with the technologies we’ve built.

Here are some excerpts from the early submissions to his digital hotline:

My physical body no longer feels like the “center of gravity” of my identity… my sense of presence is forever fractured and distributed all over the place. I close my eyes and imagine all the screens that are displaying my content at this very moment, I wonder about the total number of pixels I currently occupy, I feel like I am nowhere and also everywhere. After a while, the exoskeleton I wear online doesn’t really feel like a true expression of my inner self. It’s so much work to keep it up to date, but I basically don’t have a choice because that’s where I do most of my socializing nowadays. To be honest, my internet friends are the only people who really understand what I’m about — everyone else is stuck with a shallow, incomplete version of me.

Another entry:

I just feel like it’s becoming really hard to live in the Now. Like, the other day, I went to send a text to a friend that I haven’t talked to in a while. I was expecting a blank canvas, but instead our thread was polluted by an awkward conversation we had 4 years ago. I’m strung out across time, haunted by the ghosts of my old messages, statuses, photos, videos. Another weird thing about social media is that when you change your profile pic, it also changes the profile pic on all your old posts. It’s super jarring to see something I wrote a long time ago right next to a picture of what I look like today. That photo of me next to those words… they aren’t even the same people! Also, my YouTube subscribers consume outdated versions of me, and they always write to me expecting that I’m still the same as I was a few years ago. Time’s out of whack online and everyone knows it — just look at the comments section under any video. People don’t want to know who else is here they want to know who else is now: “Anyone watching in 2021?”

In case you’re interested in sharing your story with Aaron’s project, you can contact his digital hotline here.

My own experience

I’ve been blogging since 2005 and have written well over 2200 articles which are available both on this site and the Collaborative Piano Blog. All of these articles are freely accessible on search engines, and many people in the musical field are constantly accessing them (many of which I've completely forgotten about). Comments are still open, and reflections from over 10 years ago co-exist with things people have written last week.

Many readers know my past work better than I do. This is one of the things that differentiates blog writing from social media writing - it can be quite challenging to read someone's social media posts from several years ago. With blogging, it's not so easy to forget the past because archives are easily accessible and searchable.

A few years ago I received a kind email from a reader who started a personal project to read every single Collaborative Piano Blog article in chronological order in order to discover narratives and patterns. I’ll bet they found stuff I never realized. Back when I used to be on the road two months out of the year, people would approach me in various places and mention articles that I wouldn’t remember writing.

People email me out of the blue all the time to talk about something I had written years ago. I’m constantly having to dive into the Collaborative Piano Blog archives to see what I had written about and forgotten, but which is immediate to someone else.

But writing a blog over the course of years helped me to establish contact with many people and develop online friendships that could not have sprung up any other way. It’s like having an out-of-body existence that engages with people’s brains and hopefully inspires them as well.

The feeling goes both ways. I admire the work of my favorite bloggers, link to their best articles, and contact them from time to time to tell them that they’re doing an awesome job. Reading high-quality blog articles is one of the things that moves me forward in my own inspiration and development, especially from bloggers who aren’t interested in clickbait and ad impressions, but in having a space independent from social media where they can explore their ideas over the passage of time.