Electronic Tattoos

Your online life, permanent as a tattoo

      Juan Enriquez thinks and writes about profound  changes that genomics will bring in business, technology, and society. He is a futurist.

     A broad thinker who studies the intersection of science, business, and society, Juan Enriquez has a talent for bridging disciplines to build a coherent look ahead. He is a former CEO of Mexico City's Urban Development Corporation and Chief of staff for Mexico's secretary of state, Enriquez played a role in reforming Mexico's domestic policy and helped negotiated a cease-fired with Zapatista's rebels. He is a Managing Director at Excel Medical Venture, a life science venture capital firm, and the chair and CEO of Biotechonomy, a research and investment firm helping to fund new genomic firms.

Why you should listen him:

    In his inspiring talk, Juan Enriquez delighted his audience using kind of fine humor, wit, and incisive logic, along with the analogies with tattoos, Greek myths and Jorge Luis Borges. At the beginning he brings on stage four subjects, big data, tattoos, immortality and the Greeks,  that are the main ingredient to develop his personal opinion about digital footprint.

My own opinion

    According to Juan Enriquez, we the people living in the digital era, each of  us, tattooing ourselves digitally whether we like it or not. Our behave, tweets and our images online make up what Enriquez postulate is a potentially type of immortality.

    This data is part of the sea of big data that is growing exponentially every year. Connecting a stream of concepts , Enriquez asks, "What if Google equals immortality? -forms of digital tattoos?.

    A fundamental questions is formulated by Enriquez in his comparison between tattoos and our electronic interaction. What happens if Facebook, Google, Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn  cellphones, GPS,  Yelp, Travel Advisor, all these gadgets you deal with every day turn out to be an electronic tattoos? And what if they provide as much information about who and what you are as any tattoos ever would?

        

     A clear result has come out, our anonymity  has been modified for our online life, and privacy is part of the past and we should be prepare to be accountable for our actions, which in this case, is expressing and voicing our opinions, thoughts and pictures. We should be ourselves yet be responsible for any disagreeable seen by someone of authority in our current life or future and be put on risk of employment, opportunities, etc. We will not even talk about what other digitally put out there about us. To be or not to be myself? To share or not to share, has become the questions I ask myself.
  
    To summarize, I would say that a traditional tattoo is something that you willingly choose to display as a visual image that represent your life, your electronic tattoo is something that seems to be chosen for you.