Shadowing Practice: we're not really strangers... but i wish we were - Learn English Speaking with Video

People are obsessed with leaving a legacy.

Personal legacies, family legacies, legacy schools, artistic legacies.

The ego screams to be remembered.

Each of us is given a limited time on earth.

We only have so many years to leave our mark so that when we die, some part of us lives on.

It's not even death that scares us.

It's being forgotten.

And death starts this process of being forgotten.

There is something so irrefutable about our own existence that the thought of vanishing into thin air seems horrifying, if not literally unimaginable.

Well, lucky us.

Technology is advancing more and more to decentralize human functions, including memory, so that remembering is no longer the main task of our limited brain.

Memories are stored in phones, laptops, and cloud servers, transmitting memories into data centers that never forget anything.

With Ray-Ban Metaglasses, people can literally record everything from a first-person perspective.

It's easy to forget that these recordings are technologically mediated when they look almost as real as in original memory.

The Meta glasses are helping normalize the remembering of events without people's consent and putting them on the internet forever.

Who are we when every part of us is preserved in memories that do not belong to us?

This is a pretty crucial question for philosophers of identity.

When people talk about identity, it's not too long before they start to lament about the could've, should've, would'ves that might have changed who they are.

Philosophers sometimes use the term possible worlds to refer to such possibilities.

If Olivia could've been a mukbanger instead of a video essayist, then there's some possible world in which Olivia is a mukbanger.

Comparatively, a square could never be round translates to there's no possible world in which a square is round.

Many intuitively feel that life is an open journey.

We make choices amongst different options that then commit us to forming a certain self, but that path was not set in stone.

We could've, should've, would've otherwise.

This implies the view that individuals exist in more than one possible world and thus have identity across different worlds.

Look, there's you, or a stage of you, in world A with two arms, and you, or a stage of you, in world B with one arm.

A crucial part of being human, according to existentialism, is reckoning with this freedom of choice between possible worlds that exists at the tension of our facticity and transcendence.

There are concrete facts about us at any given time, but we are also conscious free agents that can change those facts or reinterpret those facts.

This human freedom is possible in part because of our imperfect memory.

People cannot change the fact that something horrible has happened in the past, but it's possible nonetheless to heal from these horrible experiences because as time passes and life happens, we become psychologically and emotionally distanced from the past, allowing us to forget the intensity of pain and the level of detail we once remembered so vividly.

Nietzsche also found memory to be particular to human freedom.

Most animals live in the present or have relatively short memories, but because humans have advanced memory, well, I don't know how advanced today's average human's memory is, but uh, I think we're doing better than goldfish?

Well, even if our brains are mush in 10 years, we still have entire institutions like museums dedicated to remembering.

For Nietzsche, memory is what allows humans to ascribe moral agency to our species.

We can't make people morally responsible for what they do unless they remember the choices they make.

Memory is necessary for freedom.

But what happens to that freedom when nothing is forgotten?

The philosopher Lowry Pressley writes that in our modern technological era, there is an existential threat to having so much remembered about us.

Quote, one is said to be shackled to the past, frozen in time.

Remembering is required for moral agency, but so is forgetting.

In fact, forgetting can be an integral part of our moral duties to others.

Shaping our own future depends on our ability to grow and change over time.

But that can't happen if we are always identified with past versions of ourselves.

Quote, there is a distinctive harm that accompanies the permanence of some content about us, content that impinges upon our identity-shaping practices that prompts a moral duty to forget.

Storing mass amounts of information is nothing new.

Historians, museums, and hospitals have recorded huge amounts of personal information about people long before our current technological era.

What is unprecedented, though, is the accessibility of mass information through the internet.

As a digital space, the internet has what's called context collapse, which distinguishes it structurally from physical spaces.

Context collapse is the blurring or merging of multiple contexts or audiences into one.

The internet's lack of spatial and temporal boundaries makes it difficult to maintain distinct social contexts.

When you tweet something, you collapse multiple contexts of social relations into one audience by sharing your thoughts with all your followers, which might include family members, close friends, acquaintances, work colleagues, and all the random twitter users that don't follow you.

The internet also has what's called context collision, when what you thought you were sharing in one context gets reshared in a different context.

For example, when an Instagram close friend story, which is supposed to disappear after 24 hours, gets screenshotted and reshared on Reddit to millions of users.

If I spill this bottle of water, my desk and everything on it will get wet.

Oh my goodness, my desk and everything on it has gotten wet for reasons I can't understand.

I will never understand a human being who is not being held at gunpoint who makes a video and in the midst of it says something to the effect of, I hope so-and-so doesn't see this.

I've got an idea for you buddy, don't make it then.

One of the direct consequences of a video doing well is that whoever you didn't want to see it is now going to see it.

The internet's context collapse and context collision has unfortunately been a breeding ground for online harassment.

Revenge porn sites like Is Anyone Up?

received millions of visits, where women's explicit photos and videos that were shared privately to previous romantic partners were uploaded on this public site.

Moreover, because the internet collapses context, there are many situations where the author of a post and its audience do not share the same background knowledge.

This leads to many misunderstandings, causing people to form false beliefs and sometimes reactionaries will weaponize context collapse to create misunderstandings.

Philosopher Karen Frost Arnold gives an example of a professor at Drexel University who in 2016 posted, All I want for Christmas is white genocide.

After this tweet, the professor and his friends and family became victims of an organized campaign of online harassment, including death threats.

The professor explained that his tweet was supposed to be satirical, mocking white supremacists who genuinely use the term white genocide to refer to interracial marriage and diversity efforts.

To understand the professor's intention behind his tweet, the audience would need to share this background understanding of the white supremacist use of the term.

They would also need context about the 2016 white supremacist backlash to a state farm insurance ad showing a black man proposing to a white woman, which led many racists to use the #whitegenocide.

The boundless nature of the internet invites us to feel entitled to knowing anyone in any context.

This has led to the disappearance of the stranger as a kind of person that constitutes our social world.

You might think this loss is trivial.

Who cares about strangers that I have no personal relationship with?

But as I'm sure any public figure would tell you, there are some joys that are only possible from being a stranger amongst strangers.

People watching, enjoying a smile from a passerby, losing yourself in a crowd where no one is surveilling you, no one is taking pictures that could capture your bad hair day.

That's a lost pleasure.

I see jokes online about the anxiety of walking down a street where you have an ex, two situationships, four talking stages, and 20 Instagram mutuals.

And truly, it made me kind of sad because when's the last time people went anywhere without being filled with the anxiety of mutual investigation?

Quote, Thanks to the mobile technology that permits anyone to connect a face to a name and history, as well as our acquiescence to its widespread use, we lost the social form of the person who cannot be placed at a glance, the one who is unknown but not out of place.

And we have come to learn all too late how much of what is valuable in human life depends on the existence of the stranger and the possibility of being a stranger oneself.

For it turns out that human life is both less human and less alive without the stranger, with impoverished opportunities for flourishing and fewer resources for resisting the persistent forces of instrumentalization, surveillance, and control.

Social anxiety and low self-esteem appear to be the norm amongst young people.

And this is not just a psychological property of an individual's mind, but is shaped by the social conditions that normalize surveillance culture.

The absolute ease with which one can whip out their phone to record someone, or look someone up on the internet, creates the conditions for surveillance.

And yes, filming strangers and posting them on the internet is surveillance.

You literally strip them of their social form as a stranger by making them known to millions and showing people you too could be filmed at any moment.

The norm of doing a deep dive on someone's online profile before meeting them in person is surveillance too.

There's something fetishistic about how many people judge others based on their online image, taking how they present on Instagram to be a more objective reflection of their personhood than the real things they do and say.

As someone with a public platform, I can attest to how jarring it is to meet people who already have preconceived notions of who I am.

I remember being sent a reddit post about me once, and in the replies saw someone who said they took a feminist philosophy course with me, sharing not-so-nice comments about me.

It felt like I had been made completely transparent against my will.

I talked to most people in that class, and no one ever said anything unkind to me in person or mentioned that they even knew I had a YouTube channel.

I was immediately filled with anxiety.

How many other people were keeping track of my behavior without my awareness?

The constant surveillance and verification of others is damaging to our personhood.

People might feel that life is not really worth living when their life isn't up to them to decide.

Personhood, in the psychological or phenomenological sense, is narratively constructed.

The answer to the question, who am I, is constituted by stories we and others tell about ourselves.

This involves holding on to certain stories and letting others go that no longer fit with who we are.

Lowry Pressley says the distinct challenges of the digital age grant us a right to be forgotten.

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Quote, when we learn something about another due to an act that violated another's privacy, unless there are countervailing concerns of greater moral weight, we are required to forget what we've learned.

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Forgetting plays an important role in the kind of mutual recognition that's central to us as social beings with relations to others.

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And even though technically you could escape major surveillance by deleting all social media, including LinkedIn, not using Google, and not being posted online by other people, that's unrealistic for many.

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Healthy agency requires not only knowing your life belongs to you, but also feeling that it's worth the trouble to Your future has to feel open as a real possibility.

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Thus, even if some people never need to actually exercise the right to be forgotten, the mere fact that they have the right is good.

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It gives us confidence in being autonomous individuals who can grow.

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Pressley uses Megan's Law as a real-world example of why the right to be forgotten is important.

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In the U.S., Megan's Law requires law enforcement authorities to make information about registered sex offenders publicly available forever.

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But empirical evidence shows that Megan's Law does not decrease the number of reoffenders.

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If these people cannot form new relations that are not preconditioned by the knowledge of their crimes, then they may feel it's not worth the effort to change if they will always be known as a sex offender.

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It's also why we don't brand criminals with a mark anymore.

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There's something immoral about permanently branding someone based on a past action.

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In order to explore our identity, sometimes we need parts of us to be forgotten so that we can experience ourselves in new ways.

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And in order to let ourselves change, we also need to believe in letting others change.

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Quote, the stranger reminds us who we are by making strangers out of us.

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Allowing people to be dynamic beings who can never fully be known gives life a sense of depth and resistance to instrumentalization.

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For what cannot be entirely known cannot be entirely predicted or manipulated.

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Now, there's a very reasonable worry about whether a right to be forgotten is realistic, given that we would have a duty to uphold that right.

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But forgetting doesn't seem to be something we can control.

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For example, it would be strange if I asked you, hey, what did you have for dinner yesterday?

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And you were like, oh, I forgot.

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And I responded with, oh, so I see you don't care at all about the starving children halfway across the world.

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Of course, some things are too impactful to be forgotten.

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I will never forget the first time I had ice cream cake when I was seven years old.

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That was too formative of an experience on my taste buds to forget.

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But for many things, although we cannot forget immediately, we can choose to be mindful about where our attention is given and divert attention away from memories we want to fade.

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If you see someone's nudes online that were posted unconsensually, I don't think it's unfair to say you should make an effort to not think about it and to focus your attention on other more important matters.

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It also might help to remember that there are different types of forgetting.

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Archival forgetting refers to when memories or information gets stored in the unimportant folder, meaning they're still recallable but more difficult and over time begin to fade.

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That's the kind of forgetting we have some control over.

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No-trace forgetting is when something is forgotten completely without a trace.

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That's basically impossible.

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The real barrier to having the right to be forgotten, though, is not with our individual capabilities, but with the world being run by companies who want to preserve as much information about us as possible.

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If we want the right to be forgotten, we have to change this societal structure.

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Now because some people like to be uncharitable about what I say, I need to clarify that I am not saying forgetting is always better than remembering, or you should just forget about injustice that happens to you.

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Remembering too much can be bad.

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Forgetting too much can also be bad.

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I'm not here to tell you what specific details about yourself should be forgotten or I don't know you.

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The beauty of freedom is that you can figure that out yourself.

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And that's what the right to be forgotten is supporting: the freedom to define yourself and feel like you control your own future.

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You don't have to exercise that right, it's there if you need it.

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But the reality is many would benefit from such a right in our digital surveillance society.

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Quote, without forgetting the human species would have to relive the past continuously and never live in the present moment.

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Without forgetting, there would be no future.

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The previous section of this video focused on the effects of forgetting on individual personhood, but what about forgetting as it pertains to collectives or political goals?

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Political spaces often throw around philosopher George Santayana's warning that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." So first, this is a good point for me to clarify that the right to be forgotten is important for creating conditions for an individual sense of agency.

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But on the political level, many are fighting to be remembered.

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A CBC News investigation found more than 230 cases of unsolved murders or disappearances of indigenous women and girls.

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So I hope people do not universalize what I've been saying to all aspects of life and society.

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Secondly, there is a balance to be struck between individual agency and public interest.

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Sometimes there seems to be a conflict between an individual's interest in being forgotten and public's interest in access to that information.

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For example, I think it's going to be very rare to find someone who thinks Jeffrey Epstein's interest in having his list forgotten can outweigh our public interest in having access to that list.

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To navigate the balance, I think generally as political subjects, we don't have a right to know personal details of strangers or acquaintances that don't affect how society functions on a structural level.

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By contrast, as political subjects, we do have a right to know what our government or politicians are doing with our vote and our tax dollars, especially when they contribute to the destitution of others.

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Lastly, I will say that sometimes political movements can become too attached to the past and lose sight of building a future.

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Here too, forgetting, or maybe more accurately, moving on, is relevant to politics.

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Frantz Fanon voiced his concerns with the Negritude movement in the 1930s, which aimed at responding to anti-Blackness.

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Its focus was on eliminating internalized racism by rejecting assimilation and affirming the worth of identity-related differences.

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Negritude leaders re-inscribed value and worth to pre-colonial Black traditions and practices that had been characterized as savage, subhuman, and evil.

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The thought was no one could restructure society in an equitable way if Black consciousness suffered from an inferiority complex.

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Fanon endorsed the movement as a necessary step to empower Black individuals on a subjective level.

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To see your people as having a rich history full of traditions, values, and achievements was necessary to challenge the stories that white colonists told about Black civilization.

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But Fanon, in recognizing liberation as a dynamic process, did not treat Negritude as the end of Black struggle.

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Fanon worried that if all the movement focused on was revitalizing past traditions, then the colonized would cling to these traditions as a source of pride without paying enough attention to present and future needs of the population.

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What was empowering at one point in history can become a source of pacifying, ressentiment-infected nostalgia.

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Fanon criticized Leopold Senghor for abstracting past cultural achievements of Black people to such a degree that they weren't really helpful when having to address the concrete, specific needs of present-day struggles.

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Remembering the past is politically crucial, but the point is also to transform the future.

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Quote, I do not want to sing my past to the detriment of my present and future.

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After all that talk about the upsides of forgetting, I hope you do not forget anything that I've said in this video.

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For more exclusive, ad-free philosophy videos, you can check out my Patreon, where I explain cool papers and essays.

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My most recent video was on Walter Benjamin's essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility.

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I recently lowered the prices on my Patreon tiers as well because economy is not kind.

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I hope to see you there, if not in my comments section, and if not at all, that's okay.

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Let's stay strangers, because we need more of those in our society.

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Thank you so much for watching, let's keep talking, and I hope to hear from you soon.

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Bye! Thank you to all my Patrons who support this channel.

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Thank you!

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Exploring Identity, Memory, and Technology: Insights from the Video

The video delves into profound questions about human existence, examining how technology reshapes memory, identity, and freedom. It discusses society's obsession with legacy, the rise of tools like Ray-Ban Metaglasses that record life without consent, and philosophical debates on "possible worlds" and existential freedom. These themes create a rich, thought-provoking context for English learners to engage with complex vocabulary and ideas.

Top 5 Phrases for Daily Communication

"Leave a legacy": To create something that remains after one's death (e.g., "Artists often aim to leave a legacy through their work").
"Set in stone": Unchangeable (e.g., "Our plans aren't set in stone—we can adjust them").
"Shackled to the past": Trapped by past events (e.g., "She felt shackled to the past until she forgave herself").
"Context collapse": The blurring of social contexts (e.g., Posting online can cause context collapse, as friends and colleagues see the same content).
"Moral agency": The ability to make ethical choices (e.g., Memory is key to moral agency, as we must remember our actions).

Step-by-Step Shadowing Guide for This Video

Shadowing this video helps improve fluency and comprehension of advanced topics. Here's how to practice:

1. Break Down the Dialogue

Start with short segments (1–2 minutes). Focus on phrases like "possible worlds" and "facticity and transcendence." Pause, repeat, and mimic the speaker's intonation—this builds confidence for IELTS speaking practice.

2. Use a Shadowing App

Apps like shadowspeak let you slow down audio and compare your speech to the original. This is ideal for mastering complex sentences about technology and philosophy.

3. Focus on Connected Speech

Notice how the speaker links words (e.g., "it's not even death" becomes "it's not evendeath"). Practice this to sound more natural in English speaking practice.

4. Analyze Vocabulary in Context

Write down words like "irrefutable" and "decentralize." Use them in sentences (e.g., "Technology decentralizes memory, changing how we remember"). This reinforces learning for daily use.

5. Record and Review

Record yourself shadowing and listen back. Check if you're capturing the speaker's emphasis on key ideas (e.g., the tension between memory and freedom). This step is critical for improving clarity.

By following these steps, you'll not only enhance your English skills but also engage with fascinating ideas about identity and technology—making your practice both productive and meaningful.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	could've been · has happened · have advanced
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	are obsessed · be remembered · is given
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	story, which is · person who cannot · people who already

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

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