Google Me When I’m Gone
If you’ve ever gone back as an adult and visited the place where you grew up, it is usually different somehow, in the immediate physical state, from the place in your memories. Google Maps Streetview raises the possibility of eliminating some of the discrepancies between your memory of a place and the actuality of it. Rather than you having to deal with only a few of these instances of there being two versions of the same place, there is now street after street of evidence that contradicts your memory–irrefutable images that signal the uncertainty of the pieces of your life that you think back on to realize yourself.
So, if Google tampers with your memory and makes you call into question the certainties of places and occurrences that you reference in order to form your identity, is it possible they can show you who you will become or what will happen next? They have already reached in, by altering elements of your self, and meddled with your time-space chain. Given their higher vantage point, shouldn’t they be capable of seeing further down the road?
Places that have dwelt in your memory over long stretches are not necessarily replaced when exposure to the current reality doesn’t mesh with your memory. You simply remember them as separate–one place that dwells completely intact and safe in your memory, and the new place that conflicts with that memory but that you are obliged to acknowledge. So you make two places for the same house. Even if after twenty years you were to move back into a childhood home to live, the version of that house in your memory would still remain, as well as a version of the house on the ground where you live now: two distinct places that are both derived directly from the very same matter and of identical geographic coordinates.
Subjective personal memory is a diminishing entity. People will remember things from exactly the same angle. You are rock climbing and something happens–somebody falls or drops the bag of energy bars. Your memory of the event from your subjective angle will be challenged by the video from the hat camera of your tech-nerd climbing buddy. Services such as Streetview can provide our subjective memory for us; the problem is that it will be identical to everyone else’s. Visuals are over-recorded, but there is a trade off. While video of seemingly every event on earth is available, snapshots from digital cameras are preserved on a highly selectively basis. Concerned with disk space, we erase shot after shot that is not framed just so, or where somebody made a face, or thinks they look too fat or whatever. With film, however, these outtakes live on for posterity and there is sometimes something to learn from them. For instance, those two creepy guys sitting in the car outside your house in Omaha last night are also in the background of this picture, where you look fat, taken on the beach in Mazatlan.
Looking at my small row home from behind a telephone pole I have to cursor right to see around the pole to my front door and left to see my front window. At first, the pictures on Streetview (judging from the dearth of traffic and the sun’s low position in the eastern sky) appear to be shot in the early morning. But now the images are from a later part of the day and my street is well into the dark of night. There’s no one anywhere on the street.
Now someone is in the corner of the frame, to the left, a few houses down the block. He wasn’t there two nights ago. And tonight he is closer to my door than last night. If I lean right again to peer around the pole I can see he is now at my door. His arm is reaching toward it. I hear knocking downstairs.
If this has already happened, if the pictures have already been taken, is what I do next even optional? If I start tearing along the Streetviews of my neighborhood, can I find the van this guy got out of? If, when I get back to the view of my house, I am laying dead across the threshold of my front door, is that now how I have to remember my house, and my self? Am I already dead and don’t know it, and Google is that little kid in Sixth Sense who keeps trying to tell Bruce Willis that he’s dead and it takes him forever to get the message?
Long has written about sports, news, music and travel under various names and for various publications, including the Buffalo News, The Beast, Blue Dog Press, Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the New York Sports Express, among others. He served a short stint as the guitar player in the Philadelphia metal-hop band, Incognegro. He also played guitar and sang on recordings of the Laughing Hyenas and The Unsane. He has dabbled in documentary and music video. He is a veteran of the US Navy and a graduate of the University of Houston. He lives in Philadelphia. You can google the rest.