La Voz de Galicia – June 17, 2022 →
Over the past few days, I was thinking about the notion that for better or for worse everything we do in public nowadays, no matter how fleeting it is, has the possibility of being permanent. Even though it is also likely that our private life is already in the hands of some database someplace in the world because these little devices on which we spend a large part of our existence (our cell phones), are collecting data about what we do when nobody is watching at all moments of the day. I thought about the difference between today and a couple of decades ago, and about what it means to learn to live with the idea that on social networks there is already a version of ourselves, though we may not want to.
I also thought about life in a small city, about how difficult it is sometimes to stop being who you were to be able to be who you are or who you will be because in these small circles it is not always possible to shed the image of the past to be able to construct the future from the present. There are those who prefer to leave their surroundings to be able to find themselves, and there are others who remain and try to reconstruct themselves in the same place where they grew up. But it is not always easy to evolve when everything around is a reminder of what you no longer want to be.
And it was there where I remained, in the concept that today’s digital networks, no matter how global they are, have the capability not only of perpetuating the past but also of limiting the future. And just as it happens in small villages, one cannot always leave what one was, to become what one wants to be. And that is the reason I can’t stop asking myself what it will mean for the future, those permanent memories that store everything about us, which ones will be perpetuated, and which ones will be diluted in the river of oblivion. What kind of narrative will be constructed about life…
