"What does the contemporary self want?"

A more familiar metaphor is the cloud. All that information – all that information capacity – looms over us, not quite visible, not quite tangible, but awfully real; amorphous, spectral; hovering nearby, yet not situated in any one place. Heaven must once have felt this way to the faithful. People talk about shifts their lives to the cloud – their informational lives, at least. You may store photographs in the cloud; Google will manage your business in the cloud; Google is putting all the world’s books into the cloud; e-mail passes to and from the cloud and never really leaves the cloud. All traditional ideas of privacy, based on doors and locks, physical remoteness and invisibility, are upended in the cloud. ~ Page 396