This week the New York Times introduced a new application for smart phones or tablets called Karen available April 16. Karen is an upcoming life coach who will talk directly to you about your life. According to the article, Karen is a personalized experience, morphing into the ‘user’ based on information the user supplies. After downloading the app, she asks you a series of questions regarding your philosophy of life. Part game, part story, and designed to be played over a period of days, it offers a deliberately unsettling experience, the website says, intended to make us question the way we bare ourselves to a digital device. One of the sample statements you decide whether or nor you agree or disagree with is whether or not a “small, white lie” can be necessary and useful. Get the idea?
My question is this. Why? Don’t we have friends to play this part in our lives? Isn’t this just another way to absolve us from our responsibility of friendship?
The article says the app can be played strictly for fun but if you wish to engage on a deeper level, the question it aims to provoke is somewhat subtler: Where do we draw the line between our devices and ourselves? The article states “few software characters offer the peculiarly ego-boosting appeal of adapting themselves to the user. This makes Karen an intriguing tool for exploring the knotty relationship between digital personalization and human solipsism.”
I’ve never heard the word “solipsism.” Webster’s definition: a theory in philosophy that your own existence is the only thing that is real or that can be known. What?
Are we so very into ourselves we need to analyze every detail of our personalities? “I am me and only my self exists,” the personification of solipsism.
The device I carry around with me is my phone, internet service, calendar and photo gallery. Yes, I’m aware it does more than what I can even think of at the moment, but to think an application I could decide to play with can potentially persuade me to question my integrity blows me away. To top it off, I can pay $4 for a psychological profile which would be available to me at the end of the game. That’s a good one. I don’t want to think I could be influenced enough by a gadget for absolute truth to become a shade of gray.
This article originally appeared on Santa Rosa Press Gazette: An app depicting signs of the times