the ghost version of yourself is out there.

Check this out.

A guy made this video of himself.

Then ripped it and uploaded it 1,000 times. This is what is left. Pretty creepy, if you think about it.

There is a lot of talk these days about how much of ourselves is on the internet: twitter updates, Facebook privacy, location-based apps, etc., etc. People see the internet as the newest and best way to creatively and quickly interact with the people around them, and it is. But aside from the obvious and oft-discussed deterioration of genuine personal interaction via the interwebz, what is the nature of what we actually put out there? What is a "like"? What is a re-tweet?

It is clear that we manipulate what we put on the internet to alter peoples' perception of us. That is what drives everything we put out into the cyber-world, from our profile pictures to our status updates, or lack thereof, if you're one of those "too cool for status updates" facebook users. Maybe you don't twitter, maybe you twitter everything, maybe you blog about your area of expertise or your daily musings. It's conscious, in a way, and sometimes semi-conscious (heck, I still don't even know what I'm blogging about).

Until I saw this video, I never really considered the inherently digital nature of what I post to the internet.

Maybe what we put on the internet is impersonal because there is something more to it than just what we say. Or something less? What are, as canzona puts it, "the artifacts inherent in the video codec of both YouTube and the mp4 format I convert it to on my computer," when you take out the human component?

Maybe I just posted this blog post in an effort to make my digital self seem more pensive and intellectual.