Welcome to module 59, topological vector spaces. Throughout this section, we shall assume that k denotes either the real field or the complex numbers field C. By topological vector space, we mean a vector space V over k together with a topology on the underlying set V such that the algebraic operations of addition and scalar multiplication etc. are containers. So, this is not yet a definition. I will give you precise definition in a moment. Okay, just similar to a topological group. More precisely, a topological vector space consists of an order 5 tuple, quintuple vector space V, a set V, a plus operation, a dot operation and a special element 0 and a topology tau. The first 3 V plus and 0 constitute an abelian group wherein 0 is the 0 element of the abelian group. The dot denotes a scalar multiplication k cross V to V. It is not from V cross V to V. It is not a binary operation. It is a scalar multiplication and tau is a topology on V. So, they have some interrelation here. What are that? First is a prior algebraic. The scalar multiple alpha beta of V is associative. That is the first condition. And if you multiply by 1, it is identity. 1 times V is V for every V. So, this is the scalar multiplication property of vector space, you may say.  So, 1, 2, 3 actually constitute what is the meaning of vector space. I am really defining it here. That is all. The map V cross V to V given by U V equal to U minus V is continuous. This is similar to what we have done in the topological group k. U V or x y equal to x y inverse is continuous. So, instead of multiplicative notation, we are using now additive notation because we started with this one is an Abelian group. So, additive notation is preferred here.  U V equal to U minus V is continuous. The map, the scalar multiplication k cross V to V given by alpha is going to this alpha dot V. This is the dot that is continuous. What is topology? V as a topology, k is the standard topology, equivalent topology, k cross V is a product topology. Under that, this map must be continuous. So, k is taken the equivalent topology and k cross V and V cross V etcetera here are a given the product topology. So, for those who know what is a vector space already here which we have used several times, the multiplication, scalar multiplication and addition they are continuous is the easy way to remember that it is a topological vector space. Vector space in which there is a topology with respect to which algebraic operations are continuous. This is the way to remember instead of all this list here. Notice that if you just ignore the scalar multiplication, what we have is a topological group which is abelian. So, in particular all the results that we have proved about tau will hold in this case also except that we have to carefully replace the multiplicative notations with additive notation everywhere ok. Now, what we expect is something more should happen stronger results should happen because, because existence of this continuous scalar multiplication. So, that is what we anticipate and well soon we will see that that is what is true anyway. So, let us now recapitulate, reorient our notation according to these vector space notations here alright. So, a and b are any two subsets of the notation ab we used will now be written additively that ab for topology group was alright now it does not make sense for us.  Similarly, a minus b which corresponds in the earlier one it corresponds to ab inverse right. So, at the inverse is now here minus a minus b where a is inside a and b is inside b. So, minus a which just a inverse is all that minus a where a is inside a ok. So, these are the proto type of whatever we used earlier in the case of just topological group and wrote in the multiplicity notation there. But now we have another multiplicity notation here only scalar multiplication namely a must be a subset of k and b must be a subset of v then we have ab this makes sense all points alpha dot v where alpha is inside a and v is inside b. So, as far as possible we will use these Greek symbols for the scalars or t, s etcetera. But ab, cd or v etcetera we will be denoting the vectors. We shall dispense away writing the whole five to pull all the time that is our standard practice of shortening the symbols ok notation. We nearly use the phrase v is a topological vector sphere with the understanding of addition scalar multiplication at the power g and the zero element etcetera. We shall also dispense away with the symbol dot. Now even dot we will not write just simply write its alpha v. Normally you know when you have a vector space you write the scalars on the left the vector on the right even that is liberally you can use v times alpha also if there is no confusion ok that is also allowed. But its standard notation is to write the scalars on the left. Now you start doing some topology let o be a neighborhood of zero in v. Then for any sequence of positive real numbers r n converging to infinity we have the entire vector space v is covered it is contained inside the union of r n times o where n rings o 1 to infinity such a thing is obvious in the case of r or r 2 or r 3 and so on ok. So why this is obvious for a arbitrary topological vector space I will give you a minute think about it. So you have an answer some of you must have have an answer. So congratulations if you have done it correctly here is the answer fix a v belonging to v I must show that it is inside r n of o for some o what is o? o is fixed o is a neighborhood of zero inside we get r ok. Look at the map from r to v given by r going to r times v this v is fixed ok r goes to r times v this is a continuous function why because scalar multiplication is continuous right. Therefore inverse image of an open set see v o is an open subset of v right.  So the scalar multiplication is a devil here it is going to give you a lot of things which you have missed in a metric space it would not be as strong as having a metric space ok but in some sense it is stronger also since some sense it is weaker also so that is the game we are going to play just that is why I stopped to you know to give you a little more time to think about what is happening. The scalar multiplication is going to play a lot of you know role here as compared to just the attitude which is there attitude we have seen something about topology of a group but this is the extra thing right ok so such a thing you could say in a in a topological group now I will introduce a number of definitions which will involve the scalar multiplication ok a subset b of v is called convex subset you see this was always possible in a vector space I am not doing anything else at the same definition no change of definition here ok if u and v belong to b should imply the line segment 1 minus t times u plus t times v 0 less than equal to t less than equal to 1 the entire line segment is inside b that is the definition of convex subset ok but in the notation that we have introduced it is same thing as saying that 1 minus t times b plus t times b is a subset of b so I have put elaborate notation here because you may confuse it for something else for me there is no confusion the singleton t times b is same thing as just tb this we have been using right so I have used that one also tb is nothing but singleton t times b ok so that is all the shorter notation here these brackets are not written here but this is by definition singleton 1 minus t times b plus singleton t times b so that is contained inside b same thing this is you know for each point here and each point here ok for each point here and each point here u comma v so that line segment is inside b same thing as this one once you have convexity you can talk about local convexity we say v is locally convex if there is a local base at 0 consisting of convex neighborhoods take any neighborhood of 0 inside that you must have a convex open subset around 0 contained inside the given number that is the meaning of there is a base the local base consisting of locally convex open subsets convex open subsets that will be called then we are called v is locally convex actually you should define it for every point but we do not need to bother about other points once something happens at 0 you can translate the whole thing any topological property which holds at one point will be true for all the points so that is the property of topological groups in general so it is true for vector space also okay note that this will automatically imply the same thing same thing means what it is convexity with all the points of local convexity so one point is enough for the definition like Rn that is locally convex there are many topological groups which are not locally convex so that is why we want to define this one a subset A of v is called balanced okay this is something new you might not have defined we might not have met with this one standard study of vector spaces and so on okay it is called balanced if alpha b is contained inside b for all modulus alpha less than 1 this mod alpha less than 1 becomes crucial okay when you take complex numbers that will have different meaning you see if real numbers it's just a line segment right complex numbers it's a whole disk so geometrically they will be they will have different meanings okay so balancer means that let me illustrate this one it will go over because this is a new concept okay you should not confuse it with something which you may think is the right one suppose b is a balancer set okay if b is non-empty then 0 must be inside b do you see why because look at this one look at the condition condition says that mod alpha less than 1 alpha b times alpha b must be inside b if you put alpha equal to 0 that's valid right so 0 must be inside b okay only thing is I need to have some vector here if b is empty this is automatically satisfied empty set is balanced to find but then you can't say 0 is there right so only non-empty I have this non-empty then 0 is b more generally take any vector v is b and b is balanced right okay okay the entire line segment minus v comma v will be inside b okay see once v is there I can take alpha equal to minus 1 so minus of v will be also there and minus v and plus v is there you know I can take any other number also here between t and minus t between 1 and minus 1 so all those multiples also there that means the entire line segment is there okay one element is there then the line segment minus v plus v is there so this is so far I have used only real numbers next if suppose v is a vector space over complex numbers right suppose if case your complex number and v belong to be implies the same thing now I can take the entire disk d2 multiplied by v that's also a disk because multiplying by v is a isomorphism is a homomorphism right unless v is 0 okay non-zero vector you have to take if you take non-zero vector it will be 0 that's also fine no problem okay so entire disk d2 v is contained inside b okay so this balanced the balancedness the definition of this word balanced is an indirect way of bringing the open walls inside a matrix space you will see that balanced subsets balanced neighborhoods and so on they are going to play the role of the open walls in a head metric space okay that is the whole idea of this one so I have used to be for balance but they are also you may say they are prototypes of balls in metric space okay now let's go ahead with some more definition now I am going to introduce another term here though there are no metric spaces we are going to define some notion of boundedness so it's again another backdoor way of bringing boundedness though we don't have metric okay so pay attention to this definition a subset b contained inside v is said to be bounded if for every neighborhood u of 0 there exists m positive such that this s is bigger than m implies b is contained inside s u s u s is a real number s u is like a expansion or contraction of u okay s times that open side that's it the whole thing is I started with u as a neighborhood of 0 so 0 will be always there all the vectors will be stretched by s times that right that's why if s is bigger than 1 then it will be larger smaller than it will be smaller but whatever it is s is bigger than m is important here this is not a typo this is not mod s this is s okay real numbers only here s bigger than m should imply b is contained inside s u there must be some m how small how big I don't care so that is the meaning of boundedness which is a very strange definition you will see slowly you will realize that this boundedness is actually stronger than the metric boundedness for an ordinary space okay equivalently let us look at the other way around here for every neighborhood u of 0 there exists an epsilon positive such that delta is less than epsilon should imply delta v is contained inside u so starting with a b by contracting b smaller and smaller you can bring it inside u so that is the meaning of this boundedness why this is equivalent to this one you have to just invert it you see b is contained inside s is same thing as 1 by s is contained inside 1 by s of b is contained inside u so delta equal to 1 by s so here also you can invert all of them and instead of s bigger than m it will become you know 1 by s 1 by m is less than 1 by sorry 1 by m is less than 1 by s right so this 1 by s is your epsilon 1 by m is your delta that is that is the way you can interchange these two so this is the meaning of something is bounded okay so let me give you an example here consider v equal to the complex numbers as a one-dimensional complex vector space don't go for you know very large here it's you you have to understand it only balanced sets subsets of v are empty set open or closed balls with center 0 and the entire space v so these are they all balanced now balanced that they are open balls only thing is they are centered at 0 by translating them you will get all other balls you see so that is why this definition however consider v equal to r2 now as a vector space over r itself not as complex vector space okay as a two-dimensional vector space then there are many more balances subsets such as any line segment with center 0 okay any line segment with center 0 as it's center means which you have to minus r to plus r your rotate okay it need not be r it could be line line it's lines passing through the origin that's all okay or union of such segments for example you can take x axis and y axis that will be balanced or x y equal to 0 x plus y equal to 0 and x minus y equal to 0 as well as x axis y axis and so on star-shaped thing wherein all the subsets check they must be equally distanced from the from center okay so that's why balanced the word balanced it is just that so attention should be paid specifically whether in the given context we are using k equal to r or k equal to c okay geometrically they have some different meanings here so in the k equal to r it is not exactly balls instead r it is centring intervals but but in j r2 r3 and so on this something different okay whereas convexity it is same thing no problem convexity does not depend upon whether you are using complex numbers or real numbers because the definition of convexity is only real so t times v plus one time one minus t times u where t is a real number between 0 and 1 you don't you don't use complex numbers at all so convexity is the same thing for whether you are treating a complex vector space or real vector space so I come back to an example of this boundedness also okay the world of caution about the boundedness concept that we have introduced here for topological vector spaces it is not dependent on any metric or norm there is no metric or norm we have used everything is inside a topological vector space concept also it is somewhat stronger than the usual boundedness concept in a metric space so how do you state that maybe you start with a norm in your space that is a topological vector space right any norm in your space is a topological vector space if the norm you get a metric right but the metric you change it by using this rule d of x y equal to here I have used only complex numbers or real numbers but we can do it for any norm in your space of norm of x minus y divided by 1 plus norm x y d x y divided by 1 plus d x y that is the meaning of this right then this is always a bounded metric gives you same topology so the original topological vector space will be a topological vector space with this topology or same topology right only metric has changed it is not a linear metric it is not norm okay but if you use this metric the whole of r whole of r n all of them will be bounded because it is bounded by 1 whereas immediately just look at r and the boundedness concept that we have introduced okay it is not bounded in that sense neither in the standard sense it is bounded r is not bounded when r will be bounded take any neighborhood then you must be able to collapse the whole of r by one single scalar inside that neighborhood that is not possible because no matter how much what scalar you multiply no matter how small epsilon times r is the whole of r itself right so r or any other vector space are not bounded in that sense okay so I promise that in the second part we shall consider another concept of boundedness for metric spaces which is even stronger than this this metric this boundedness concept okay so that will be called totally boundedness which is which is the name is quite justifiable so that will be done in only part okay so let me have one more simple lemma before giving a break here for v belonging to v and alpha not equal to 0 we have the linear homeomorphism respectively called a translation operator tv and a multiplication operator m alpha for alpha m alpha for v tv so these are two two homeomorphisms okay of course if v is 0 the tv will be identity but for this one you have to assume that alpha is not 0 okay otherwise multiplication will collapse the whole thing it will not be a homeomorphism so how it is defined tv of v is equal to u plus v m alpha of v is alpha times in particular for any subset open subset u of v and any subset x and y of v and k and so on you will have this similar theorem that we had earlier namely x plus u equal to u plus x here because this is commutative why you I do not want to write you why because scalars should be written on the left only they are open some sets of t okay so this is this is something which we have done similar to just the case of topological groups what do you think this is new because then alpha is not 0 there is a multiple inverse also m alpha inverse will be inverse of m alpha so m alpha is also a homeomorphism okay this is the extra thing that is happening here okay so lemma is obvious why because you have to just use that these are homeomorphisms so x plus u you can write it as union of little x plus u they are copies of u therefore the each of them is open therefore x plus u is open similarly why u is union of alpha u where alpha runs over y alpha u is open because alpha is a alpha multiplication by alpha is a homeomorphism okay so we shall stop here and reap the harvest of all these observations if you have made next time remember the definition of convexity balance is that local convexity boundedness these are the new concepts I have introduced so I next time we will you know use these things and produce many interesting results here thank you


I'm Alvin Shen with CalTV Sports. I'm here with Kobe Pettis of the women's softball team. So, Kobe, we knew that you had a rain day yesterday, so the game got canceled and now you have two back-to-back games today. What does that do for team fatigue or does that affect the team at all? I think this is what we practice for in the fall. You know that there's chances that you're gonna be playing these doubleheader games coming into pack series and with the weather the way it's been, like it's something that you expect coming in and just having that day off yesterday actually really helped us today knowing that we're playing this doubleheader and coming into this just being prepared for it and well-nourished, got some good sleep last night. So I think that didn't play much in effect just coming out here in the mentality and keeping that mentality of we need to win two games, we need to win the series, so. And this team travels a lot on road games, for example, to Cornwallis, to San Diego and recently to Honolulu. What does that do for the team? Does it increase team bonding and chemistry or anything else? Yeah, I think it's definitely a good thing that does build team bonding. We're traveling on the road and we're together for that long period of times and the travel and everything like that and then having those roommates on the road and the hotels, I think the only tough thing about travel is missing school. I mean, at the end of the day, that's what we're away from but we're with our team and it's good things. So I like traveling and it does do a lot for the team and yeah, traveling is tiring but at the end of the day it's good, it's a plus. It's definitely worth it, right? For sure. And so you're also a very accomplished player already. Pack 12, honorable mention and then US Junior National Team member in 2015. What do all these awards mean to you and how does it inspire you to be better, moving forward? Yeah, I think they definitely like set the bar of wanting to be better and wanting to achieve more but just coming out here and playing with heart and those those awards and accomplishments are gonna come just play hard and keep working hard and being a good teammate, so. Once again, this is Alvin Chen with CalTV Sports, signing off. You're also ranked number one in the nation. Last year you were individually ranked in the nation. Number one.


I have a wonderful speaker for us this afternoon that I am very, very pleased to have at CNI, Professor Kate Eichhorn. Kate is a professor of new media and culture at the new school in New York. She wrote an amazing book that came out over the summer called The End of Forgetting, which I hope at least some of you have read and I suspect that many of you will read if you haven't read it after hearing her. I read this book, I've been fascinated by the whole question of remembering and forgetting and how that plays out in the digital environment for years and have followed discussions about things like the right to be forgotten and some of the effects of digitization and digital media on how we remember and how families remember and things like that. And so I heard this book was coming out and read it shortly after it came out and it's just a wonderfully insightful kind of restructuring and rearrangement of the whole argument and the whole question. And I certainly came away thinking really differently about some of the issues here. I reached out to Kate and she very graciously after a little persuading agreed to come and speak with us and as I got to know her work a little better and I probably should have recognized this more clearly just in reading her book. She actually has a very deep understanding of archives and special collections and other parts of her body of work have been deeply involved with them from other aspects. So her thinking about this is deeply informed and perceptive from many different angles and I think she'll bring all of that to us here today. So please join me in welcoming Kate. I'm just so pleased to have her here. Thanks so much for that lovely introduction. It's always an honor to have these invitations particularly when they come from colleagues who are not in your immediate field. But as some of you will know I have been writing about archives and libraries and more broadly about questions of media and memory for many years and I'll say in advance that I've always done this as a humanity scholar. And so I do recognize that sometimes humanity scholars talk about these questions in an inaccurate, somewhat metaphorical and even irritating way. Archivists always tell me that there's nothing more irritating than a humanity scholar talking about how magical the archive is. And as my friend Jenna Friedman at Barnard likes to say these materials don't just appear. So I'll call out to recognize thank you for making these materials accessible to those of us who work in humanities fields. So today I'm going to talk about my most recent book The End of Forgetting, but since I delivered that manuscript to Harvard in 2017, summer 2017, lots happened. And so I'm also going to use a lot of examples today at that point to more recent political events. And since I've even published the book last June, I think that my thinking about this question has also evolved. And so the conclusion to the talk points to some of the things I'm thinking about now. So in the 20th century, if one was truly mortified by a photograph from childhood or adolescence, there was a simple solution. It secretly slipped the photograph out of its frame or a family photo album and destroy it. In seconds, a particularly awkward event or stage of one's life could be effectively placed under erasure. The photograph's absence might have been noticed, but in an analog era, unless one's relatives were fastidious enough to keep the negatives and thank God most of them weren't, once ripped up or burned, one could be more or less assured that this embarrassing trace of the past had vanished. And without the photograph's presence, one could also assume that any lingering memories of the event or stage of life would soon fade in one's own mind and in the mind of others. In retrospect, this vulnerability to human affect, to the shame and anger that once led us to destroy photographs with our bare hands, may have been one of the great yet underappreciated features of analog media. Over two decades into the age of digital media, the ability to leave one's childhood and adolescent years behind, along with the likelihood of having others forget one's younger self, are already deeply imperiled. This shift is an entirely negative, but there are compelling reasons to conclude that it comes at a cost and it comes at a higher cost to some people than others. And for this reason, how we respond as scholars, as information professionals and policy makers matters a great deal. So I wanna begin with a fairly bold claim that some people might disagree with. Forgetting is no longer necessarily the default, it's already the exception to the rule. And I'm not talking about everyday forgetting. We still forget names and places, whether or not we have any milk in the refrigerator, so on and so forth. What we're losing isn't forgetting on a short-term basis, but more precisely our ability to control what is remembered and forgotten over time. And to illustrate, I think it's useful to think about this recent event. In some time, a couple months ago, The New York Times had an article about mega-face. And so back in 2004, long before today's digital natives were uploading photographs of themselves and their friends to Instagram or Snapchat or other social media platforms, their parents and grandparents were uploading photographs to sites such as Flickr and they were taking those photographs. And as reported in The Times this fall, none of them could have foreseen that 14 years later, those images would reside in a huge facial recognition database called mega-face containing over 700,000 photographs of individuals. The database has been downloaded by dozens of companies to train a new generation of face identification algorithms. And it's used to track protesters, surveil terrorists and spy on the public at large. But mega-face is just one example among many of what I'm talking about. So in this talk, I wanna talk a bit about the history of children and youth and their engagements with media technologies and what's changed particularly over the last 20 years. I wanna talk about some of the social and psychological impacts of these changes. And I wanna conclude by talking about the political impacts of these changes. Since I completed my book, this is not something I write about in the book, but since I've completed the book, one of the things I've started to think about is that the reason why the decline of forgetting matters is that it risks calcifying political perspectives including extreme political perspectives at a younger age. But first I wanna sort of go back in time. So to be fair, we've always been trying to overcome forgetting. And as a media studies professor, I talk about the fact that most media technologies were developed for one of two reasons to overcome the barriers of space or time. And if you're talking about overcoming the barrier of time, you're really talking about overcoming the limits of human memory. How do you create machines that can preserve something and have it move across generations? And as much as we've at times been suspicious of these memory making machines, we've also been enamored by them. In a 1923 issue of Kodakery, which was a trade magazine put out by Kodak, a commentator philosophically reflected, Kodak is a partner of memory, a silent partner, yet able to be very eloquent, full of interesting suggestions without saying a word. And it's almost as if the commentator was reading Freud. It reminds me of Freud's essay, Screen Memories. And he talks about the fact that childhood memories are always molded by powerful forces from a later period. So what we remember isn't accurate. It's been edited and curated to make it somewhat more tolerable. And I think that this passage isn't unique. There were many media technologies throughout the 20th century that were basically marketed as memory making machines. It's also important to point out though that it wasn't just adults that gained access to media technologies in the 20th century. Prior to the 20th century, children and youth really were not able to represent and document their own lives. And with the invention of the Browdy camera, late 19th century into the early 20th century, this changed. So people often talk about someone like Steve Jobs as having been one of the first people to market technologies not to businesses, but to consumers and also to create technologies that were child friendly. And I'd argue that Eastman was doing this in the late 19th century, early 20th century. But there were still limitations to something like the Browdy camera. They were relatively affordable for at least for middle-class families. But the film was actually quite expensive. And so if children wanted or adolescents wanted to document their own life, they still had to get an adult to actually help them develop that film. So they could take a limited number of images. And those images were subject to quite a bit of adult censorship. This changed a bit with the Polaroid camera. Some people have argued that Polaroids actually were a precursor to today's digital selfie culture. Because you could literally take that camera. It was very light. You could take a photograph of yourself and your friends and almost instantaneously enjoy the image. And many of us will remember that experience of looking at the image come into view. So I think it's a compelling argument. In fact, media historian Peter Bruce makes this argument in his book, his recent book on the history of the Polaroid camera. But I'd argue that if you actually think about those images, a Polaroid shares more in common with a Renaissance painting than it does with a digital image. They're one of a kind documents. They were basically impossible to reproduce. And so there are similarities in terms of how people interact with those images. But they're very, very different than the digital images that we're now dealing with. So I wanna talk a bit about what I think has changed. And in this particular audience, most of you actually spent a lot of time thinking about these changes. I'd argue that the general public hasn't necessarily thought so much about all the changes that have happened over the past 20 years and how they've affected children in youth. And so I wanna talk about content, scale, context, discoverability, and the value of image making. So, you know, some of you might remember the Photomat. They were these weird little blue huts in the middle of a parking lot and you would bring your images to them. And my aunt actually worked at one. So I knew that when she got people's photographs back, she would look at them. So she knew what all her neighbors were up to. So as a teenager, I would always tell my friends, like, don't bring your photographs to the Photomat. And we would drive to another town to get the photographs developed, depending on what the content was. So although teenagers in the 70s and 80s and 90s, they could take photographs of themselves. Unless they had access to a dark room, those images were still heavily censored and self-censored. And again, with the Polaroid, you might be able to take a picture of something more lascivious, but it was a one-of-a-kind document. It wasn't widely circulating. So problems that we now have with teenagers like sexting, for example, really didn't exist in an analog era. So that's one thing that's changed is the actual content of the photographs being produced by young people. There's also no question that the scale has changed. This is a statistic that is often repeated in articles about digital photography, 80 billion photographs in 2000 by 2015, 1 trillion, 75% of all those photographs shot on mobile phones. Interestingly, I haven't been able to find statistics about what happens after that. And I think we just stopped counting, honestly. One estimate is that from 2015, on Snapchat, 8,796 images are posted every second and over 30 million images every hour. So I think that probably explains why we're no longer keeping count. So the scale of the images in circulation, obviously, is just something we can hardly grapple with. Another thing that, of course, has changed is context. Who knows what this is an image of? Someone must. So it's known as the Star Wars kid. It was actually recorded in 2002. The young man in the video, his name is Gislin Reza. He was a 14-year-old at the time. He made this video of himself imitating a Star Wars character. He left the cassette on a table at his school. Some kids found it. And it actually took them four months to upload it to the internet and circulated because this is before Vimeo, it was before YouTube. And when it did finally end up on the internet, it went viral. So it's widely known as the first example of an internet meme to go viral. It's also probably the first moment when a lot of people realized cyberbullying was going to be a big problem. He's now in his 30s. He has recently spoken out about cyberbullying and his experience. It was really devastating for him. But he's still known as the Star Wars kid. So that one moment, which was really meant to be something that only he viewed, maybe a few friends, has come to kind of define his life. So we can no longer easily, obviously, control the context of images that were meant for a very limited audience. Another thing, of course, that's changed is the discoverability. We've already talked a bit about this and people have talked a lot about this at the conference. Again, you can think about a site like Flickr. I think that nothing could have seemed more innocuous than tagging photographs of your family on Flickr back in 2004, 2005, or 2006. It was an extension of a practice people had already been engaged with in for decades. Writing a name or a place or a date on the back of a photograph. No one understood exactly how they were contributing to laying the groundwork for facial recognition technologies. I think we can also look at sites like Facebook. I don't think people realized in 2010 or 2011 when Facebook was pushing everyone to start tagging their photographs that they were also pouring millions and millions of dollars into developing facial recognition technologies. And so obviously discoverability has shifted, but in terms of children and youth, the most important thing that's shifted is the value of these images. I think that we can say with some certainty that in the past no one really cared about what children or adolescents had to say. They weren't interested in their videos. They weren't really interested in their images. We weren't really interested in their opinions. And I like to say that back in the 80s, kids hung out at the mall and they were seen as a social nuisance because they weren't buying anything. If you're hanging out online, you're generating data. And so that is the real game changer. I also want to, before I go on and to the rest of the talk, I want to sort of make it clear that this isn't a moral panic argument. I think that particularly in my field, whenever you critique any new media, people are like, you're engaging in a moral panic. You think you need to protect young children. I think the fact that for the first time in history, children and youth can document their own lives and share those images is really exciting. The fact that young women for the first time can really participate in the public sphere in a way they've never been able to do that before, I think that's incredibly exciting. So I certainly don't think that we should limit access in any way, shape, or form. I do think we need to talk seriously about the fact that children and youth are engaged in free, uncompensated digital labor on a daily basis. And I also think we need to think about the social and psychological and political consequences of these shifts. So having said that, I'm going to skip ahead and talk about, this is something I do talk about in the book, the decline of the cycle social moratorium. In the mid 20th century, psychoanalysts named Eric Erickson published several books where he introduced this concept of the cycle social moratorium. And he essentially argued that the adolescent mind, he says, is essentially the mind of the moratorium, which I think is kind of funny, a cycle social stage between childhood and adulthood and between the morality learned by the child and the ethics to be developed by the adult. And he argued that essentially the cycle social moratorium, it's not a moratorium on experience, but a moratorium on consequences. So he's arguing that during this stage, you're able to go out and do things, make a few mistakes and be forgiven. Now, I would argue that not everyone has always been able to fully benefit from this cycle social moratorium he's talking about, to say that young visible minority men in America haven't had consequences for things they've done as youth that would just be wrong. On the other hand, I do think that most cultures across time would agree that young people should be able to make a few mistakes and not be defined by them permanently. It's why in most places in the world, not necessarily in the US, we have different laws for young offenders than we do for adult offenders. So I think that what's happening with the decline of forgetting is that the cycle social moratorium is eroding, that the ability of young people to make mistakes and move on, to reinvent themselves and not have their past selves kind of follow them into the future continues to go into decline and that there are broader consequences for that. And I wanna talk about these shifts in relation to some current social and political events. Many of you will recognize this calendar. I mean, it's kind of ridiculous that we recognize this calendar. It's Brett Kavanaugh's calendar. We were all looking at it for a couple weeks in fall 2018. We were all obsessed with what he was doing at a particular day, at a particular party. And that's a really interesting case to think about. On the one hand, some forms of evidence, there's the notorious calendar, I think his mom probably just cooked it up in the basement. And also the yearbook with the lewd remarks about a classmate did come forward. But at the end of the day, those printed documents or manuscripts had no bearing whatsoever on the outcome of the hearing. And I kept asking myself, what if it hadn't been 1982 and it had been 2012? We would have had social media posts from that party. There certainly would have been photographs. They're digital photographs, so they wouldn't just represent what happened. They'd carry metadata that would tell us who was there when they were taken, the location. And we would have cell phone tower data that would tell us who was in the vicinity of that party. So the whole discussion, as opposed to pivoting around the foggy memories of people now in their fifties, would have been a discussion about that digital evidence. To me, there's no question that in another 15 or 20 years, when people are running for public office, we're gonna spend a lot more time looking at what they were doing when they were teens. And it will involve that kind of evidence. I think in some ways, it's interesting to compare him to Kyle Kishu. He was one of the survivors of the shooting in Parkland, Florida. Unlike his classmates, Kyle did not become an anti-gun lobbyist after that shooting. He became a sort of NRI poster boy. And for a while, things were going very well for Kyle. He had the invitation to the White House. He was also getting other high-profile speaking gigs like this one, and he got something that every young American wants, which is an acceptance to Harvard University. Many of you will know what happened next after he received his acceptance. His classmates remembered that back before his notoriety, before the shooting, I think it was in 10th grade when he was only 15, he had been working on a homework assignment in a Google Doc, and repeatedly used the N word in that Google Doc. They remembered this, he also remembered, because he actually went back and deleted those comments. So he knew it was wrong. But it was very easy for them to recover an earlier version of the Google Doc. They shared that with the media, and of course, Harvard rescinded his offer. And I think there's many reasons to applaud Harvard for their decision, and it's not the first time in recent years that they've rescinded offers of students who have been found to be posting something racist or anti-Semitic or sexist on a social media site. But I also think it raises some interesting questions about how that digital data that students produce on a regular basis in schools is going to follow them into the future and the impacts it will have on their life. So it might be actually more appropriate to compare Kyle's actions to, of course, this is the Prime Minister of Canada. I just want to say as a Canadian, I'm not proud of this, and Governor Northam, right? There are two elected officials who didn't have to pay any price. Another question we have to ask ourselves is where were these images, right? They had already both been elected into those positions by the time those images came to the surface. In the future, I don't think that that's going to be possible. And this came up in the opening plenary, right? What does it mean to digitize high school yearbooks? On the one hand, that project could be really interesting because these images won't just be hiding in someone's drawer anymore, right? On the other hand, there are other images in those yearbooks that might incriminate people in ways that we don't want. So they're just questions, I think, that we need to ask ourselves. The other thing on the topic of data in schools, so in Kyle's case, he was using shared Google Doc, which is part of the Google Classroom Suite, and it's a very kind of common application used in the K to 12 system. But it's not just Google Docs and digitized yearbooks that we're talking about. We're also, particularly in the United States, where educators are concerned about school shootings, there are a variety of school security apps that have come on the market over the last few years, including this one, which is called BARC. And essentially what happens is it monitors any kind of digital activity happening in your school. So if a student's looking at a questionable YouTube video, a message might be sent to an administrator.  So they also make these mistakes. What is disturbing about these school security apps is although the private companies claim, they usually claim they delete the data after 30 days, they share that data with schools, and most school boards actually keep that data for years. We also know that in some cases, if there's any sense that a student might be committing, at risk of committing a school shooting, they'll share that data with the local police. And we don't know how long that data will survive. So there are a variety of questions about privacy and teens and adolescents. So there's two issues here. One, I think that teens are being asked to be more accountable than adults in some cases. And then I think there's a bigger question about where all of this data from private education companies and school security companies resides, the duration of its existence, and its potential impact over time. The worst case scenario is that some of that data will survive and theoretically could be sold to a job recruiter years later so that you could have information that was collected about you as a middle schooler that's then being sold in some other contexts. I'm not saying that's going to happen, but right now there's really no regulations. And so these are questions we need to think about. Another issue I wanna talk about is the extent to which young people are becoming, I think, overly risk adverse. So we hear a lot about young people like Naomi H who was in the news about a year ago. She got an internship at NASA. She did what one would do.  "'I got accepted for a NASA internship.' "'I would do the same.'" But her friend did what someone would do. She retweeted it using the NASA hashtag. A former NASA engineer saw it, commented on her vulgar language, and she lost her internship. So every week we hear stories about members of Gen Z saying or doing dumb things online. I wanna argue that I think they're the exception to the rule. I actually think young people are, by and large, extremely risk adverse and kind of obsessed with their reputation management. And there's some evidence to support this. So we know college admissions officers over the recent years have increasingly been looking at social media profiles. But interestingly, since 2015, fewer of them are looking at social media profiles. And if you ask them why, they'll tell you it's because they're not really finding very much anymore. Because young people are becoming increasingly concerned about what they post online. And I would say that this has actually been happening for a while. This is a 2012 Pew Research Survey. And they found already then a high percentage of young people, 59% had deleted or edited something, 45% had removed their names from photos in which they were tagged. And I think they're doing this because they know that how they show up online will profoundly impact their future. And in this case, I think LinkedIn is a really interesting example. A few years ago, I did what one does as a responsible parent in a digital era. And I Googled my daughter. He was 13 at the time. And I was bracing myself. I thought, what's going to show up? And the thing that showed up online was her LinkedIn account. I knew that at the time you had to be 14 to get on LinkedIn. So I did what one, it felt kind of ridiculous. In the 80s, people lied about their age to get into a bar. Now kids are lying to get on LinkedIn. So I confronted my daughter who was in middle school still. And I said, did you lie about your age to get on LinkedIn? And she said, I did. And I said, why did you do that? And she told me it's because LinkedIn has its search engine optimized and that it would rank first. Which I thought was very smart. But I also had this question, is my kid a freak? And what I found out is actually there are thousands of underage LinkedIn users around the world. So originally LinkedIn had a threshold of 18. In 2013, they lowered their age to 14 in the United States, 13 in some jurisdictions in the world. And now recently they raised it back up to 16. I contacted LinkedIn a few months ago and I tried to get data on how many underage users they have and they would not share that data with me. And they wouldn't talk about it at all. Which I thought was curious but I'm still gonna try to write about this. So I've been interviewing young people and asking them why they have a LinkedIn profile, how they're using it. Some of these kids are in middle school or early high school and they always say the same thing. They are terrified that if they don't have a professional profile of themselves wearing corporate clothes standing in front of an office building with their accomplishments coming up first on Google that they won't ever get into college or get a job. And I think that that's kind of sad. So I think that what we're talking about here is as opposed to focusing on young people doing dumb things online, I think we need to be talking about that kind of extreme risk aversion. If you have people who are so afraid that they might say or do something that comes back to haunt them, will they ever be able to innovate, to try out new identities, experiment with new ideas? So I think that that's one risk. And then I think the real risk is not really a social question, but a political question.  They're probably living in a rural area, they're right wing, that's it for them. But if we imagine that let's say they're in their late teens and we think about what happens to people when they go off to university, we know that when people do an undergraduate degree, they tend to move to the left. I don't think that it's because only people who are already more liberal minded end up doing university degrees. I think a lot of people arrive on campuses and their perspective shifts over those four years. And so I think, and there's evidence again to support this idea right now, we know that people who identify as Republicans are losing faith in US universities, not because they think it's not a good way to get a job, but because they feel that their ideological leftists sight. There's even, I don't know if anyone here is from Iowa, someone is trying to pass a bill where you will have to ask all university faculty who they vote for. Yeah, and if the difference between Republicans and Democrats is more than 10%, there'll be a hiring freeze. And so obviously this is, right, I don't think this is gonna happen. Apparently the senator actually lied about his higher education credentials and he's not writing again. So I think he just doesn't like us. But all this to say that I do think that something happens between the ages of 17 or 18 and 22 or 23, people change. And I don't think everyone leaves university with the same opinions that they had when they arrived. But I think that something potentially very troubling is happening right now.  And I'll just conclude by unfortunately bringing up Kyle Koshu again because I think it's an interesting example. When he lost his offer to Harvard University, he did what any digital native would do. He went online and he tweeted about it. And this is what he said. He said, throughout its history, Harvard's faculty have included slave owners, segregationists, bigots and anti-Semites.  And honestly, I think his argument is a poor excuse for his actions, but it does raise a question. Should the past define one's future? If there's no hope that one can change over time, what are the broader implications, not only for individuals, but also for society? What we're really risking here is a society where geeky kids will remain geeky, where dumb jocks will remain dumb, and worse yet, bigots will remain bigots because the idea that you can change will no longer exist. So identities and political perspectives will be calcified, not necessarily because people are resistant or unable to change, but rather because the past will define who one is in the present and the future. And I think in a world where partisan politics and extremism continue to gain ground, this may ultimately be the real consequence of coming of age and of air when childhood and adolescence replay on an endless digital loop. So I just wanna leave you with some questions, which I'm sure you've already thought about before. And namely, as information professionals, how should we preserve and render images and other artifacts produced by and about young people discoverable? And what are the kind of ethical and political stakes in these decisions that we'll be making over the coming years? Thank you so much again for the opportunity to be here. Thanks. So I don't know if there's any questions. Don't feel obliged. I know it's the end of the conference. Thanks so much for leaving us with such interesting commentary and so much to think about. I'm wondering if you think there might be a point in time when everyone shares the same very exposed youth and that might shift at all the perceptions of what is acceptable, what's unacceptable, that whole notion. I wonder if you think there'll be a point in time where that youth exposure might be viewed differently because everyone shares the same history, if that makes sense. Yeah, no. And this is a question I've thought a lot about because people always ask it. Will we end up just having a new normal? And I think that my fear is that this new normal will be very kind of unequally rolled out.  So young women who are assaulted, often those assaults are now recorded and repeated online. So theoretically, having this visual evidence that someone was assaulted should actually lead to more charges. It should actually be a really kind of liberatory moment for young women. Instead, what's happening is those images, in one case, there was a really drawn out case that I talk about in my book that took place in Canada actually in 2011, 2012. And in that case, the actual images of this 15 year old girl being raped at a party, the judge originally said, well, she was smiling and so therefore she obviously consented. And so sometimes those images are used against young women. So when I think about this new normal, what I think is that people who are already marginalized will probably have the most at stake. You can talk about this in terms of hiring too. People who already face discrimination in the job market. Will recruiters be more likely to go back and dig and find images that are incriminating? It's like if you wanna find it, it's there. Will people like Northam or Prime Minister Trudeau, necessarily in the future, face a more interrogation because of those images? Maybe not. So I'm not so optimistic. I think that the kind of existing power relations will be replicated. It's a really cynical answer, but yeah. I'm Michael Seidel from the University of Berlin. In Germany, there is a legal right to be forgotten and court has recently confirmed that. To the best of my knowledge, that law doesn't apply in the United States. Is a legal right to be forgotten sufficient or is the gap between what law says and what is technically possible too great? Yeah, I think that a legal right to be forgotten is a step in the right direction, but that it is very unlikely to happen in the United States. For most people in Germany, the idea of accumulating vast amounts of knowledge permanently is viewed in a very different light than it is in the United States. So the historical and cultural context of different countries makes the right to be forgotten is something that, yeah, I just don't see it happening here, because whenever it comes up, it's seen as a front on people's right to access information. But I think it's a step in the right direction. It might not be enough, but it is moving towards something that is a possible partial solution. There's no more questions or queries. I will wrap things up and we'll move on with the end of the conference. Thank you so much again. I really was honored to be here. So there's an awful lot to ponder there and there's a lot of things to think about in a surprising number of contexts. I have to say that one of the things that Kate's work really helped illuminate for me was how much baggage is following around younger people now in a way that certainly 20 or 30 years ago even was unheard of. And that's a really important phenomenon and I think a really important thing to understand as we try and understand students and then as it moves out into society. So I'm really grateful for you sharing that perspective with us. I think it gives us a lot to think about too about archiving, about family histories and about public policy. Your example with schools is really fascinating and troubling and that's the kind of thing that really is potentially managed. You could do something about that with a public policy lever in a way that social media broadly is much, much more difficult to do anything with. Anyway, I hope that you've come away with it from this with a lot to think about and I would just say Kate's book is very rich and explores a lot of other perspectives on this as well. So don't feel like you know the whole story completely here. With that, all that's left for me to do is to thank you for joining us to wish you safe journeys, happy holidays and I hope to see many of you in San Diego for our spring meeting. Thanks for coming.


This is a very important moment, a very important scene, unfortunately it's happening more and more frequently. To some of you it may be unfamiliar, yet others of you may recognize the significance of that army command car and the curious look on the faces of that combat crew. And among them is the young man to whom this day is one of precious remembrance and importance. Yes, that's rear gunner Corporal Williams, or Pee Wee as the boys call him. This is his day, but there were a lot of other days before this one, and it's worth telling about. It's quite a yarn. It all started where it started for most of you, right in that glass fishbowl. But what happened after that? Well, let's just track this story down. Yes, there's always a certain quote in the Air Force for enlisted men. What branch do you feel you're qualified for, Williams? Kind of thought I'd like to get close to one of them flying fortresses. Well, he got close to a big plane, all right, very close. That's known as really starting from the bottom. And maybe Pee Wee and a lot of other little fellows don't feel so important, but the gunnery schools are always on the lookout for men short on height, long on ambition. Morning, Pee Wee. Morning.  Well, I'd sure like to be in there, sir. I'd like to shoot a gun again, too, sir. Have I ever handled one before? Well, not one of these caliber 50s, no, sir. But I had an old shooting iron back home I used to like.  Black killers? Well, sir, oh, them scrows. We call them black killers. They're mean bird. They used to raid the duck nest, sir. I got so that I could peg them on the wings. Pretty good shot, huh? Well, not bad, sir. Sergeant. Yes, sir? Take Pee Wee over to the skeet range. He might make a gunner. Right, sir. OK, Williams. Let's go. OK, Williams. Paul! Is that all I have to do, hit that little thing? That's all you have to do, sir. OK. Paul! It's not a switch. Williams. Sir. Pee Wee, how'd you like to go to gunnery school? Oh, yes, sir. Like that fox. You'll be hearing from him. They're aviation's mightiest little men. Where do they come from? From every corner of America. And here they are, student gunners at one of America's three vast gunnery schools. Yes, and there's Pee Wee. It's his first day, and he's on the brink of a new world. And they will be divided into small groups of six to 10 men. Each group will have one instructor who'll be your guide and teacher throughout the five weeks of this course. The job of the aerial gunner is a vital and important one. The lives of your combat crew and the success of a mission depend on your shooting ability. Your government is aware of the importance of flexible gunners in the victorious pursuit of this war.  Good luck. Aim well and shoot straight. Tick, tick! Aim well and shoot straight. That's a hopper. You know, back in Coney Island, I was a regular passie for a shooting gallery. Used to blow all my dough trying to win a Cupid to offer my girl. My girl, she's nuts for Cupies, and I can't hit the side of a bond. You mean you got prizes for shooting? Certainly. Oh, heck, you know. Back in Kansas, we didn't get nothing, except maybe the pleasure of hitting down crows. Well, at least you had a workout with a gun. Me, I'm starting from scratch. Let me tell you something, sweetheart. I'm itching to start. And me, too. I wonder how long for them classes start. How long? My brother, you're starting in right now. You increase the sight base. The buttons you do to the diameter of the ring sight in order to keep the same miles per hour reference sight. Well, you have to increase the diameter. It's very good. Questions and answers every day faster than bullets. This is a class in exterior ballistics. In other words, what happens to that bullet after it's fired? What are the five forces that affect trajectory? Propellant charge. Movement at a mount. Air resistance. Gravity and drift. And what do you think? After two weeks of going to school, Pee Wee finds himself on the BB range. The red flag. That means there's firing going on. Berlin and Tokyo beware. These young marksmen are picking up the odd of rapid sight alignment of the proper handling of a gun. No country club or millionaire shooting lodge offers a finer skeet range than this one of Uncle Sam's. Gunners on wheels, trucking on down. This is the moving base range, and it's plenty tricky. A little surprise for the boys who thought they were getting to be expert shooters. With the truck rolling along in one direction and the targets flying out in a dozen different directions, well, just try it, Pee Wee. Not bad, Private Williams. Looks as if you're learning a few new twists.  When these lads start heading out for actual firing on moving targets, assimilating combat shooting on the ground to ground turrets. How you doing there, sir? Yeah, you can get in there. I'll track your target and fire on whistle. Accounting the kill, tabulating the score of each student. The bullets dipped in different color lithographic paints leave their mark on the canvas, thus enabling the instructor to see how many hits the gunner has scored. Pee Wee, we get low to my score there. Boy, if I had to go like that 50 caliber, just thinking of the amount of Cupid dogs I could have knocked off of Coney Island. You can't win any Cupys in the Air Force, Benny. But if you keep on shooting like this, we'll let you get a couple of jabs. He saved some for the rest of us, Sarge. Not so fast there, Gunner. More ground school and study and midnight oil. But all the better to shoot well. Site harmonization is the adjustment of the site to the gun so that the line of sight will intersect the trajectory of the projectile at the desired range. We're sure learning some mighty fancy words. You said it. If I wait till the boys in Brooklyn hear me make with this scientific routine. Williams, what type of aircraft is this? JU-87B German Stuka. Identifying characteristics? Fixed landing gear. Negative Dahidra wings. And from this side? It's a square fin in the offset cockpit. Not bad. Yes, Pee Wee is far from that Kansas farm now. He's explored a labyrinth of technical and ballistic knowledge that makes the American aerial gunner the keenest in the world. Hey, Betty, give me a get-up. What's with you? Well, I just got a letter from Lieutenant Ames. And he's holding a spot for me on a B-24. No kidding. Putting you in a tail? Yeah, he figures I kind of fit there, see? You know, that's about the best news I ever had. Hey, you've got a coming here.  They used to say I was the most unlikely to succeed. Well, they kidded me so much, I began to think they had some. But this letter is going to change all that. You said it while you belong in that fishbowl like, uh, like, uh... Like corn in a husk. Sure, sure. You can tell them all the time it is now. Sure. Look, Pee Wee, I've been taking a gander at this war. And let me tell you something. The more I sit for my tail seat, it's the gunner boys that are giving out with the stuff that's going to decide this clan bait. Well, yeah... Of course, it's only my personal opinion, but... Well, you know, the way I look at it, it takes all kinds of guys doing all kinds of jobs to win this war, see? But ours is... I figure it's a mighty big job. And by golly, it makes you feel big just to be in it. Hey, fellas, hurry up. It's nine o'clock. We're due out in the range for night firing. Oh, this isn't the 4th of July. It's just shooting in the dark, learning the use of tracer bullets. And in case you didn't know, the object of tracer bullets is to give the gunner an idea of his accuracy and lead. Those gunners will tell you that this is fascinating stuff. Those bullets, by the way, are chemically treated so that they light up, giving the gunner a perfect preview of where his live bullets are going. Hey, Benny! Yeah? Where you going on your pass? Listen, some after four weeks in this school, I'm gonna realize a lifelong ambition. Get her up again, mister. Oh, give us a break, will you, soldier?  Gunners of the ground, farewell. Yes, it's the fifth and last week and what a week. The gunner takes to the air, putting into practice everything he's learned during the past month. He's about to get a sniff of ozone at an altitude of 10,000 feet. You gonna harmonize and check, Pee-wee? Yes, Sarge. Properly monitored. Right? Scared? Well, I'm nervous, but not scared. Good boy. No, they're not scared, these budding gala heads of gunnery. They're eager and anxious to get the feel of actual combat. And here, in air-to-air shooting, they get it. Approaching the tow target, the gunner's aim is level. This is straight beam firing and is the first step in air-to-air shooting. Unstow your gun, get ready to fire when target comes into range. Congratulations, William. Thank you, sir. Yes, this is a golden moment. A moment of proud achievement when Pee-wee Williams, along with hundreds of other gunners, gets his diploma. This diploma is his passport into the vistas of victory. Meet the crew. Is that a block? Is that a doile? I'll do it. You may be Sergeant. Yes, how are you? Sure. The fishbowl's waiting for you. One room apartment, just for you. Well, it looks like Holmes. All right, man, you fix it, man. Realizing a long, visual dream, Pee-wee, a full-fledged, flexible gunner becomes a part of America's vast, striking Air Force. And he joins the valiant fliers, heading for a place called over there. Happened thick and fast over there. Pee-wee got his first taste of combat under fire. Zero posting from the left. Those weeks at Gunnery School are flashing through his mind. One dawn, July 15th, the crew took off on a bombing mission, a particular mission of strategic importance. Pee-wee discovered that sitting out on the tail turn of a bomber is a great spot, because you can always see the enemy before he sees you. They also found out that the guy in the tail is protected by the finest all-steel armor played in the world. They were ordered to attack an elusive Jap aircraft carrier. Once the target was sighted, every keen-eyed member of that crew swung into action. The pilot bombardiers, the gunners of their stations. 600 pounders of TNT blowing up right in Hirohito's face. But then the real trouble started. 5-0's heading in, manned your stations. Not through yet. One more trail and I'll stand by. It looks bad. They're just waiting for us to drop. I hope those gunners can hold them. The English service model has been awarded by the ward department in the name of Congress to the following name, Corporal L.A. Williams. Corporal Williams, it's an honor and a joy to share this memorable day with you. War doesn't always allow us much time, so just let me say that I'm as proud of you as the crew members and crewmates whose lives you saved. I've had the pleasure of presenting medals to many gunners since this conflict began. And when the armed air force pays tribute to you, it also recognizes the heroic and brilliant work of the gunners who since the beginning have proved how indispensable they are in achieving victory. Their importance to the air force can never be stressed too much. Our pilots fly the planes. Our navigators tell them where to go. Our bombardiers bomb their targets. Those same gunners are continuing every day to help blast the enemy from the sky. But you are the men who bring them home safe. You gunners are the modern Knights of Fire, the administrators of life and death, an integral part of the greatest all-American team. You and thousands of intrepid, valiant gunners of the Army Air Force with this distinguished service medal, I wish you the best of luck. May God bless you all. Thank you.


Hey survivors and frivers, welcome to the video, please like, comment, share and subscribe. Click the bell icon so you can receive all of the notifications for my future videos. Please donate to support the channel. If you are interested in one-on-one coaching with me, NarxViver, please email me at narxvivercoaching.com. In this video I am going to be answering a question I am sure a lot of you have after moving on from the narcissist. What happens to the narcissist once you have moved on? You shouldn't really be interested in what they are doing with their lives now, but I understand that people want closure and that is probably why you have chosen to watch this video. As you are approaching the discard phase, the narcissist will do whatever they can to hurt you at this point.  It's all about getting that last bit of narcissistic supply before they leave and feeling as though they have won. They will also want to leave you in a state where you are not going to be good enough for anyone or anything after they are gone.  They have to feel as though you are broken and you can't find happiness without them. They also want you to remember them after they are gone. So they will do whatever they think you will never forget. Following the discard phase, whether the narcissist has discarded you or you have discarded them, nothing really changes with them. They typically fall back into their old patterns of behavior. Following the discard phase, they go through stages. The first stage is denial. This is where they deny that you ever meant anything to them. They deny that you ever did anything for them. Even if you were together for years, in this stage, they will just deny that it ever meant anything. After the denial stage, it depends on how great of a supply you were to the narcissist. A good source of supply is someone who can give them attention, validation, approval and admiration as needed. The narcissist needs to feel superior, important and special around you. You must feel as though you are inferior to them and do not outshine them. They also need to be feared. They need someone who can make them believe as if they know it all. They need to be able to judge and control you. They need to feel as though they can rescue you as though you are nothing without them. They need someone to manipulate and exploit or take advantage of. You have to allow them to make your life difficult by them not cooperating with you. In some relationships, especially if you do outshine them, they will live through you in an attempt to boost their low self-esteem. The narcissist likes to bask in your reflected glory as they exploit and take advantage of you. If you did all or at least most of these things, then you were an excellent source of supply for the narcissist. They will be affected by losing you. If they think that you still believe in them and there is still a chance that you could validate their false selves and their illusions, they will hoover you. They will try to love bomb you all over again. They might tell you that they are sorry and they realize what they have done wrong. But over time you will soon see them return to their immature dysfunctional behavior. But if they know that you see through them and you see what they are really about, that is going to affect how great of a supply you are to them. You have to believe what they are saying. You have to believe what they are showing you. If you cannot do this, they will continue to devalue you and degrade you as a person. They will triangulate you with a new source. They might even post pictures on social media knowing that you will be looking on their foreclosure. You can expect emotionally abusive phone calls or text messages.  The last thing they want is for you to move on and start believing in someone else. They are pathologically jealous. They want you to be so broken down that you can never find someone else ever again. Whether they come back or not depends on you. Whether you continue to reinforce your boundaries. They will test them and try to get back in. But if you continue to distance yourself from them, there's not much they can do.  You don't feel the same way about them anymore. Now the narcissist begins to feel rejected as though you have discarded them. This will cause a narcissistic injury. Once they have received this narcissistic injury, they struggle to control their emotions. This is when they will begin to act out and do something so reckless that it just completely sabotages what they are trying to achieve. This is also an act of revenge for giving them this narcissistic injury and although they are still trying to hoover you, they cannot control their emotions and end up messing up their own plan to secure you once they know that you are not coming back or you are not going to validate their false selves, lies or illusions.  They have to devalue and degrade all of this. You don't believe in them, you don't validate their false selves, you realise that they are not real, not authentic and the best you will ever get from them is an illusion. This makes them feel inferior to you, they already have low self-worth and low self-esteem but now they just feel completely worthless and insignificant so to regulate their sense of worth and significance in the world. They have to devalue and degrade anything and everything about you when they have re-idealised their source and believe them to be exactly what they are looking for once they realise that you want nothing to do with them. They cannot continue to see you in this way if you don't validate or believe in them, you're nothing anyway, that's how the narcissist sees it. Deep down they know that they have messed up or made a mistake but they also know that it's too late to change that now so the only thing they can do now is to go back to their alternate reality or world where they completely detach from you, they invalidate your character and personality, they devalue and degrade anything and everything about you, this is the only way that they can feel good about what happened, once this feeling from devaluing and degrading you no longer satisfies them, they return to the feeling of worthlessness and insignificance, this is where they go into a reckless stage where they become a tension hose, flirting with anyone, doing anything they can to get attention from people, they might even change their physical appearance to make themselves look more appealing, you might see them dressing in a way that is completely out of character for them, at this point they are doing anything they can to seek attention from other people because you are no longer validating their false selves, their lies and illusions, they need constant attention, validation, approval and admiration so whatever they think other people want to see, they will start acting or dressing in that way to make themselves seem more appealing, you might be wondering how the narcissist could move on so quickly and start making such drastic changes to their character, personality and appearance, you have to understand that narcissists have very low self esteem and self worth, they cannot build on this on their own from within themselves, they need to be externally attended to, approved of, validated and admired constantly, they are extremely insecure, they do not validate themselves or trust their own judgement, they may have told you that they are so happy and they are meeting new people or whatever, but this has nothing to do with them trying to find happiness, they have to create ulterior stories to distract themselves from the reality of what is really going on, this is why they need to seek excessive attention from people, you might see them be an extra friendly to other people to regulate their self worth and self esteem, once they have lost you as a source of supply, they have to do all of this, they no longer have anyone to validate them or regulate their self worth and self esteem, when the narcissist has no source of supply, this is when you will see just how out of control they really are, they find ways to deal with this such as indulgence, addictions and coping strategies, they might start drinking alcohol or doing drugs, going from person to person, just trying to find someone to regulate their self worth and self esteem, they act as though they are so tough or strong, but if you pay attention to their behaviours, you will realise that these are all coping mechanisms or defence mechanisms to regulate their true feelings of worthlessness and insignificance, if the narcissist was really the confident person with high self worth and self esteem as they portray themselves to be, they wouldn't have to do all of these manipulative tactics, they wouldn't need to constantly seek attention, validation, approval and admiration from other people, they wouldn't have an obsessive need to control their environment, these behaviours all come from a place of inferiority or weakness, all of these tactics are just an attempt of masking how weak they really are, if they were really the strong, confident people they portray themselves to be, they wouldn't want to destroy their relationship with you, no healthy mature person with good reasoning would ever want to destroy their own relationship, so once they realise that you are no longer going to view them in the way which they desire, you are no longer going to validate their false selves, their lies and illusions, everything you see from that point on are basically coping mechanisms to deal with their loss, even in normal relationships it is very difficult for a person to find someone who is compatible with them, for a narcissist to obtain an ideal source of supply, it is far more difficult, remember the narcissist has all of these specific needs which they expect to be fulfilled by the new source, they need a source that can give them excessive attention, validation, approval and admiration as needed, a sense of feeling superior and feeling important, they need to be feared, they need to feel as if they know it all, they need to be able to judge and control the new source, rescue them so they can feel as though they are nothing without them, someone to manipulate and exploit, someone who gives them everything they need without requiring any form of cooperation, it is very difficult for a narcissist to find a source who can do all of this for them, so if you did all or most of these things for the narcissist and you have moved on, it is going to be a huge loss for them, they don't realise it at first because of their magical thinking, fantasies and illusions and their exaggerated sense of importance or worth, but the truth is they may never find someone like you again, which is why even when they do move on they will look for you in someone else, they will try to turn the new source into another version of you, but it's never the same, many of them even end up in relationships with other narcissists or borderlines and then they get a taste of their own medicine, they become reckless and turn to addictions, doing anything they can to feel alive until they finally find a new target, they repeat the same process over and over again, they never change, they never accept responsibility or accountability for anything that they have done, which means that they can never learn from their mistakes, they can never grow and this results in them being stuck in this endless cycle of repetitive behaviours which leaves them to remain in this emotionally immature state, they never adapt or correct the very behaviours that put them in these types of situations, so it is inevitable that these situations can only continue, they can never change, grow or develop, they continue to live in denial, lying to themselves and everyone else, only associating with people who will believe in their false selves, lies and illusions, but you can change, you can self reflect, look within yourself and understand what led you to be in a relationship with a narcissist, you can heal your childhood traumas, become self love abundant and then attract someone who is emotionally healthy, you can experience real love, joy and happiness, you will never experience this with a narcissist, but you can experience this with someone else, a person who is loyal, honest and trustworthy, a person who still values morality, you can move on and find a person like this, please check out my playlist of videos on healing from narcissistic abuse, where I give specific steps on how you can do this, you will never experience love, joy or happiness with a narcissist and they will never experience that with anyone else, but you can move on and experience it with someone else, thank you for watching, I hope this video resonated with you and helped you to understand what happens to the narcissist once you've moved on, please like, comment, share and subscribe, talk to you soon.