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We just want to emote until we're dead. -- Of Montreal
My last overly sentimental post on memory and whatnot seems to have had a strange irrational effect of a number of people who crawled out of the woodwork to email me, which is kind of nice and I enjoy it though you're showing your age by emailing me. The things is the kids today have their intimate dicussions (not to mention drunken sex videos right here on the page, that's what the comments are for.
Or at least that's what I'm given to believe. Or at least that's what New York magazine would have me believe.
And I *do* believe. What other choice is there?
The article linked above made me realize among other things that my job at Wired is doomed. In five years the target demographic of Wired will know what's Wired, what's Tired and what's Expired long before we do. [note to editors, for that last issue the cover needs to read: "Wired: you, Tired: your privacy, Expired: Us]"
The New Yorker article is a nice wake up call for those of that niavely believe that you can somehow maintain privacy on the web. Case in point, using Google Analytics I can tell when almost everyone I know reads this page. The day after I send out an email announcement I typically see two hits from the ATL area (hi Jimmy, hi Nancy) one from some tiny town northeast of Athens (hmm. who could that be?) a handful from Los Angeles (Corrie, Bill, Faith, we'll get drinks soon), San Francisco (yes I am coming up there, eventually), London (ditto the last aside) and some strange person living in Philadelphia (?). Not only do I know that you read it, I know when you read it. But don't worry I'm benevolent.
You think your life is yours but it's not, you are logged, tracked, mapped, videoed, photographed, and in a couple rare circumstances with my readers in the midwest, anally probed by aliens, every waking and sleeping moment of your life. And what's more all that is going to end up on the net, tagged, sorted, filed, cross references, indexed and ranked. No it isn't going to, it already is. (just click the photos tab above)
Why does this notion freak us out? How did I come to suddenly be the guy over thirty who doesn't get it? I write this and publish it for anyone on God's green earth to read, so I should be fine with right? But the things is, much as I want to be fine with it, I'm not. If you thumb through the artchives you'll notice I tend to publish these late at night. Some attribute this to a love of late night adventures, but the truth is I do it so I can fall aasleep as fast as possible so I don;t have to experience the painfully embarrassing sensation that alwasy follows that moment when I press send.
I realized tonight that while I have for all intents and purpose embrassed some of this put-it-all-out there mentality of the kids, I don;t have the tough hides they've developed from doing it for years.
It's not that the kids today are fame whores with no sense of privacy, it's that they've grown up with the things we're still adjusting to as a fact of everyday life. They know there is no privacy left.
Oh you can Ted Kazinsky it in the woods somewhere, but you'd have to go all the way to substistance farming to really drop off the grid.
So your options are develop a heightened sense of paranoia worthy of some auxillary stock option in Renolds Foil Company or you can embrace. Join flickr, join YouTube, join del.icio.us, join Facebook, blog about your , post your drunken photos from that afternoon at the beach or those videos of yourself dressed as sexy pocahontas while your boyfriend chases you round the kitchen table with a tomahawk while a Gwar plays in the background. Don't worry we all do it.
And make sure it's Gwar that'll confuse the hell out of the kids.
When it is more important to be seen than to be talented, it is hardly surprising that the less gifted among us are willing to fart our way into the spotlight,” sneers Lakshmi Chaudhry in the current issue of The Nation. “Without any meaningful standard by which to measure our worth, we turn to the public eye for affirmation.”
(who I've been reading for the last four years and who I genuinely think understands the emerging youth culture better than anyone else)
Sorry Kevin you'll always be that (really nice, friendly) guy at Vision Video to me.
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