I really enjoyed reading Nussbaum’s article, “Say Everything,” because it definitely defines our generation and says basically everything about what goes on in our not-so-private world. It mentions that people who are over 30 can feel this gap between the young and the old who define kids today to have “no sense of shame. They have no sense of privacy. They are show-offs, fame whores, pornographic little loons who post their diaries, their phone numbers, their stupid poetry—for God’s sake, their dirty photos!—online.” Although this may describe young individuals who have personal websites dedicated to themselves to be fully exposed, I completely agree with Nussbaum when she says, “it may be time to consider the possibility that young people who behave as if privacy doesn’t exist are actually the sane people, not the insane ones.” We are completely aware that what we put on the internet on our Facebook, Myspace, Xanga etc. are content we share with our on and offline friends and that there are consequences and different responses to the information we share.
We ultimately put up pictures of ourselves and update statuses and likes about things that are currently going on in our lives so that other people can see them. We do this for attention whether we admit it or not. When people say that Facebook and other SNS are superficial and they are not really involved in that world, they are lying. Recently my roommate came home gossiping about a girl in her class who said she thought Facebook was superficial and that’s why she didn’t use it, but then my roommate looked her up on Fb only to find her classmate on FB and having more than enough friends online to show that she’s clearly a FB user. Even though she sets her profile to “private” to her non-virtual friends, whether she likes it or not, she was easily searched in the search engine. I think it’s funny that people say they aren’t really into these mainstream websites because of privacy reasons but in reality they have an account, and whether they’re active users or not, they too can now be searched in the Google search engine.
I think that we like to record our lives on Facebook and other websites because we like to document our events and pictures as memories for ourselves. We can go back to them as evidence of our golden years. The internet is an archive of our memories. Posting personal information isn’t just for the pleasure of being the center of attention among other users but it’s also for our personal satisfaction. Our diary has been published online and we’re fully aware of that because we chose to upload it. I think there’s nothing wrong with that, and the fact that we have the freedom to establish an identity online for people to read, see, and comment, is a rewarding process. I get that there are consequences to disclosing personal information online but I think individuals, I mean EVERYBODY in our society, knows the repercussions if they posted something that could ultimately ruin their reputation and could affect those involved in their life.
I also came across a lot of users asking people to reblog and sign the petition for the Congress to not censor the Internet. A lot of Tumblr users were saying how they would lose their blog and would no longer have the freedom to post their content on their site. I think that if we were to be censored then there would no longer be an issue of privacy becoming too public but then we’d have a bigger issue of freedom of speech and issue of control. There would a be a hell of a lot of angry users of the Internet and I think that this would cause more harm than protection for individuals.
The control to upload our own content is the Internet. It’s what makes the online world what it is today. We wouldn’t be as socially connected online, we’re not just users going on the web to find dry information but we’re there because individuals are part of certain online communities.
