For several years now, social media guru and author Erik Qualman has produced and posted an animated video on YouTube that presents statistical evidence regarding the influence of social media on both marketing and global culture. If I made that sound boring, I apologize. Yes, it is statistics, but startling ones presented in a thought-provoking way. The latest version, Social Media Video 2013, is now available on line and I highly recommend investing the four minutes it takes to view it – particularly if you have any interest in communications, marketing, advertising or business.

The information that most intrigued me related to the increased blurring of boundaries between the digital world and the analog “meat space” we continue to inhabit. Here are a few examples of what I mean:

• 1 in 5 couples are first meeting online (3 in 5 for gay couples)
• 1 in 5 divorces are blamed online
• 72 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute
• Social Gamers will buy $6 billion in virtual goods in 2013, compared to only $2.5 billion in real goods bought by movie goers
• 92% of children under the age of two have a digital shadow

A digital shadow, for those who haven’t hear the term before, is different from a digital footprint. Your digital footprint is the total amount of information about you that exists anywhere on the web. In part it consists of your first-person, web-based actions, such as sending e-mails, taking pictures, blogging, skyping and the like. The balance is your digital shadow – second-hand records that can include everything from your name in public or financial records and on mailing lists, to your Internet search history and appearance on security cameras or other people’s Facebook posts.

So an infant begins to project a digital shadow as soon as the proud daddy takes baby’s first photo and includes it with a text message to the new grandparents. By the age of two, it is entirely possible that the child will have a robust online persona while still wrestling with the concept of personal identity.

A study by International Data Corporation in 2009 (using 2007 data) disclosed that the “digital universe” back then was 281 billion gigabytes. That averaged out to 45 gigabytes per person on the planet, although it is safe to assume that the true numbers are significantly lower for those in the Third World, and much higher for we in the industrialized countries. Furthermore, they estimated that the digital shadow accounted for at least half of a person’s digital footprint.

As I am writing this, that data was already five years old; imagine how those numbers have multiplied by now.

Putting this extensive digital identity together with the growing and pervasive effects that digital media is having on our day-to-day lives, I have to question whether the boundaries I mentioned before are becoming blurred or simply irrelevant. Does it make any sense to continue the fiction that a wall exists between our online identity and our physical one? When was the last time you heard anyone use the word “cyberspace” (and didn’t feel like chuckling)?

Consider this: how much would the personality revealed by your digital shadow conflict with the face you present to the world every day? I’m not suggesting that you have immoral or criminal activities to hide, but everyone has innocent vices and little indulgences that they prefer to keep to themselves (you don’t tell me yours, and I won’t tell you mine).

There is no guarantee (written or implied) that the offline and online worlds will always remain separate. In fact, there is no reason to believe that they will. There’s a show on CBS called Person of Interest that is built around the idea of a super-computing “machine” that culls through all of the world’s digital chatter – everything from phone calls to security camera video feeds – and identifies people whose lives are in danger from some undetermined threat.

If you believe that the technology sounds a bit far-fetched, you’re in for a surprise. The NSA is investing $2 billion in the construction of a cybersecurity data center at Fort Williams in Utah. This one-million-square-foot server farm will consume 65 megawatts of power, all dedicated to sifting through digital data to identify possible terrorist threats. Coincidentally, that’s what the machine in Person of Interest was originally designed to do. Which comes first, fiction or fact?

And once the government develops a technology, it’s only a matter of time before industry and commerce co-opt it for profit. Could there be a more powerful marketing tool than a system that can assess our behaviors and trends instantaneously – both individually and as a group? The folks at Facebook are already using the digital data they’ve gathered to target us for specific advertisements, and Amazon bombards us with suggestions based on our prior purchases. This is only the beginning.

Kurt Vonnegut said the only novel he had written that came with a moral was one of his earlier works, Mother Night. As he put it: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Then, of course, there’s Lamont Cranston’s line from the days of vintage radio: “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The shadow knows!” As “virtual” and “reality” continue to merge, both are good messages for all of us to keep in mind.