Pixels and Persons

There’s a difference between knowing someone and knowing about someone. It’s the difference between persons and pixels. 

The Greek word for “person”—prosopon—also means “face”. Before the digital era, if you wanted an image of someone’s face, you had to hire a painter or sculptor to create it. Then came photography and now—digital images, which are essentially visual displays of data.

Digital images are getting better and better, and as a result, the conversation about digital privacy is getting louder. As Seth Godin asserted in a recent podcast episode that inspired this reflection, people don’t like to be surprised by what a stranger could know about them.

But knowing about someone is not the same as knowing a person.

What’s the difference? Being present. Being attentive. Being curious. And the magical reciprocity that happens when while listening deeply to someone else, you get to know yourself again or in a new way, simultaneously affirming the humanity of both yourself and the other person.

We will make the digital images even clearer and the machines even more efficient and the robots even smarter. Because we can. Marketing based on personal information will get even more precise. But as this happens, I hope we will ask ourselves the kinds of questions the Amish ask and avoid falling into an unconscious Faustian pact with technology:

What might I lose from buying a product or service that is done by a machine rather than a person? Is what I might gain worth what I might lose? Where else could I get what I might lose?

If they don’t already, the computers will eventually know more about us than we know about ourselves. But they will never know us, for we are unique and unrepeatable mysteries, always changing and becoming someone different. Of course, we will try to program this into the algorithm, trying to close the gap between a person’s rate of change and the data trail left by that change. But the created thing, no matter how powerful or intelligent it becomes, will never truly know its creator.

Because to know a person truly is to know that you can never truly know that person.

Click here for Seth Godin’s thoughts on digital privacy.

Click here for a short article about the Amish and new technologies.