Your identity in an object

During last week’s workshop we discussed thinking differently about our work and about ourselves. Here’s an example:

It is an object that has helped him construct, interpret, ponder and crystallize his identity, or at least his idea of it. It came to him in the early 1970s, when he was in medical school at the University of Lisbon. The sculpture, made by a woman he had just begun dating a fellow neuroscience student and a sculptor named Hanna Costa, is a little terra-cotta figure of a man seeming to fight his way forward in a storm. And it all but cried out to Dr. Damasio with a mysterious urgency.

“Somehow I felt that it was me, or belonged to me,” he recalled. -via NYTimes.com.

To kill or not to kill my Facebook account

Most people struggle to kill their accounts permanently. Like a bad high school romance, we break up with Facebook, only to flirt and make up, and then break up again.

This begins to make sense when we realize that Facebook has become a prosthetic of our memory.

But not just a prosthetic of memory in general, a simple list on a scrap of paper is that much; it is a prosthetic of our autobiographical memory. It’s a part of our identity, and it is very difficult to kill off a part of one’s self.

via Social Media, Social Memory