Jun Haeng Lee
As technology becomes more accessible, we are living in a society embedded with digital media, and it is getting harder to ignore the fact that humans hold two separate bodies, in both physical and digital society. Those two concepts are constantly interacting even
without you noticing. Digital media has been quietly substituting the social constructs and interactions that humans built in the physical realm. Digital copies of photographs become memories, text messages become conversations, and various social media spaces claim their territories in the digital realm to build their own society within the digital society. While we are moving forward to this new era of being digital, does it make us naive to give into the idea that digital media will last forever?
While it seems like time flows in a linear line in the physical realm, the temporality of human beings seems to be a dot in an empty space, being ever so static, everlasting and independent in the digital world. However, do humans truly believe that within this digital realm, the concept of ageing would magically stop functioning anymore? Or do they simply hope to believe? We love to believe that we have tamed transience, that we are entering an era no longer constrained by it. We can digitally transform everything, and we believe that it is true. We can easily summon texts written two thousand years ago, revisit places we have never been, speak to simulations of the dead, and trace the history of almost anything by simply visiting digital archives. We imagine a future where consciousness might be stored, bodies augmented, ageing deferred—a life extended beyond its natural limits.
This may appear like a promise of permanence, but does permanence always have to be the end goal? Why not embrace fragility? Everything ages and dies. Servers fail. Data corrupts. Platforms vanish. What seems infinite is often temporary, dependent, and unreliable. Even in this unprecedented digital age, the struggles over power, class, community, identity, and narrative have not diminished.
However, When everything appears retrievable, nothing feels unique.
When everything seems eternal, nothing feels valuable enough to cherish.
Let’s continue our discussion further, even though this conversation will age and die eventually.