So far anyone reading these brief Blogs might wonder why am I interested in having a “digital presence” (particularly given much of what I have produced so far has been somewhat disjointed and probably hard to follow)? Well, as someone who has been involved in the world of computers for the past 30+ years, digital is part of who I am! For much of this time I have been fascinated by ideas of artificial intelligence and the idea of building digital “beings”. My interest has been expedited over the past year or so as a result of my health situation. In fact, at the point of my stage 4 cancer diagnosis a number of things came together: If I was going to follow up on my ideas of a digital presence I realised I had better get on with it, a number of books and articles on the topic appeared ( I was not alone in my thinking), it seemed to me to be an activity that would give me something to focus on at a difficult time and I realised I would be able to continue to engage in one of the activities I most like doing – tinkering about on a computer.
My first aim was to just get myself out into the digital world as pervasively as possible. As I have worked on trying to achieve this aim, the digital landscape that is available to be “populated” has expanded far beyond my original expectations. I now doubt that there is an endpoint as to what is possible, but I know I will enjoy seeing how far into this digital “cloud” I can go.
Once I realised how much of a presence one can have in the digital world, I began to think about how enduring this might be. This is an area of interest of many recent books and articles, particularly with regard to what happens to digital stuff after death. It is a much more difficult aspect of the digital world to understand and it is hard to predict what will happen in the future.
I think what I have come to understand, perhaps more than most people who are interested in this stuff, is that ideas of digital pervasiveness and what might be digitally enduring are highly interdependent. This is an aspect of digital “presence” that I will continue to explore in these blogs.
I will keep reporting on what I am learning as part of this really interesting journey into cyber-space; hopefully a little more coherently that has been evident in my blogs so far.