The Digital Self 

- Carl Trueman

     Technology is decisive for the way we interact, how we imagine who we are. 

1. Technology weakens the bonds of community. Today, most of us experience music by individual consumption. We listen in private. Entertainment captures how technology shapes the way we imagine ourselves. We are sovereign. We can bend the world to suit our desires. 

2.  Technology gives us a sense that we are all-powerful. We can simply bend the world to our wills. Institutional authority is eroded. We no longer connect with bricks and mortar...or the institutions.

3.  Technology fosters a third cultural intuition. Phenomena once considered moral problems now are no more than technical problems. STD infections simply are solved with the right antibiotics. The risk of disease or pregnancy once meant that sex came with responsibilities. Technology has broken that connection. 

     These three strands of imagination come together in transgenderism. It assumes that nature is just raw material. Technology is key in determining what is right and wrong, and what is possible. Our bodies lose authority to our minds, feelings and inner desires...and medical procedures. 

     Technology allows for public performance. Social media makes all the world a stage. We can present any part of our lives to a vast audience...for exhibitionism. You don't have to read Nietzsche to think that nature has no intrinsic authority...that reality is whatever you might care to make it. 

     You don't have to have heard of Freud. You need only a steady diet of social media...or to follow the plotlines of mainstream movies or TV shows.   

Conclusion tomorrow: Future Shock