“Kids today. They 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. They have virtual friends instead of real ones. They talk in illiterate instant messages. They are interested only in attention and yet they have zero attention span, flitting like hummingbirds from one virtual stage to another.”
For this week’s readings, the “Say Anything” article by Emily Nussbaum struck me as spot-on for my generation. While the quote above may be a bit over the top, I agree that younger generations are diving into the virtual realm as soon as they obtain internet access. Earlier this semester, while watching Life 2.0, we saw how Amie’s daughter engaged in a virtual environment through the use of Penguin World (or whatever it was called).
Nussbaum notes that “the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion… your life is being living in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.” The notion of privacy is null and void when we consider the surveillance that is present in the digital sphere. Between page views, visitor logs, archiving, and tracking, the pervasive nature of “big brother” remains. As younger generations begin to acknowledge this irrefutable fact, they have adopted the potential and opportunities for “self-documentation to deepen the intimacy of daily life.”
Nussbaum revisits the “national drama” associated with the release of Paris Hilton’s sex tape in 2004. Twenty years earlier, this type of scandal was seen as “genuine humiliation”, causing Miss America Vanessa Williams, to give up her crown. However, with the new aspects of disclosure on the Internet, the viral nature of the video transformed into “just another piece of publicity” and then into “a kind of power”. For any young woman who may have followed the story, they witnessed the transition. Through this situation, the affluent heiress was granted more publicity and power – if this represented the worse-case-scenario of revealing information on the Internet, what could possibly be the risks? By offering a “perverse blueprint for surviving scandal”, our society was sent the message that technology and the Internet can allow any young person in America to become “a public figure”. From this perspective, the benefits of disclosure seem too outweigh the risks and have made “being transparent” worth it in the end.
The benefits are obvious: The public life is fun. It’s creative. It’s where their friends are. It’s theater, but it’s also community: In this linked, logged world, you have a place to think out loud and be listened to, to meet strangers and go deeper with friends.
I found that this quote really summated a lot of what we have learned this semester. Our lives in the virtual world are promoted for the public. Our information is on display and can be modified however we wish in order to cater to our “audiences”. What we share and how we choose to share it depends on our personalized motives and we conduct ourselves accordingly.
