I will not, however, gloss over the context of this blog's creation. I am a native Philadelphian who has recently been blessed with time to think, consider, persuade, vent and write. I will attempt to write and post a substantive piece every day for the next two weeks. I hope that these entries will serve more as a cathartic exercise for me than as party favors for guests. Coming full circle, party favors which are to be distributed at a party of one reminds me of the old adage of a tree falling with no one to hear such evidence. Nonetheless, if on the off chance that someone does find this Concerned Philadelphian, I hope they enjoy the posts.
The subject of this first post is, what I'd call, "the immediacy of embarrassment" made possible by the now unending web of easily transferable and downloadable digital information. Initially, I thought this entry would lean primarily on the peculiar trend of parents or friends using sites such as Facebook and MySpace to offer nearly unfettered access to the public to those less-than-noble moments of their family and friends ("Baby Joey picking his nose" or "Melissa drunkenly making out with Tom at the bar") captured and quickly uploaded by a Blackberry and how this has changed (at least my) self-perception. The more I thought about it, though, the more I think that the immediacy of embarrassment is brought on by individual choices that actually reinforce personal independence, as opposed to the unflattering posts made by folks in your viewable vicinity which I initially thought robbed individuals of some sort of intangible liberty that was wholly off limits even ten years ago before the age of BlueTooth and the Cloud. This is the see-saw in my head. Allow me to explain both.
I am of the age where the documentation of my formative years is preserved either by the memories of the folks who I was with at the time or by printed film pictures which rest comfortably in albums or frames. All of these mementos are appreciated (for better or worse) in a rather contained universe- my immediate family, cousins/aunts/uncles, grandparents. The fact that I wore an embarrassing jean jacket to my middle school graduation may be the source of playful jibes while we discuss yesteryear after Thanksgiving dinner, but such taunts generally end not long after the last piece of pumpkin pie has been consumed. The memory itself is extracted from its collective familial archive, examined over laughs and flushed cheeks, and ultimately refiled, all within the confines of a familiar living room and crowd of loved ones. My hunch is that if you have successfully managed to access and read this blog, you know quite well that those days are gone, never to return.
Events deemed recently newsworthy have recently produced headlines like "unborn fetus accepts two hundredth Facebook friend invitation." Obviously, baby John or Jane is not personally clicking the "Accept" button for such offers, offers which undoubtedly include their parents' co-workers, friends of friends, and, even more tangentially related, theretofore unknown fans of unborn fetuses who can accept Facebook friend invitations. In this action lies the transition that moved me to write: the tight confines- both real and psychological- of a post-Thanksgiving ribbing session have given way to a world in which with two depressions of a thumb, individual autonomy of likeness and reputation is almost totally decentralized. While that clearly seems to be an unattractive byproduct of the digital age, I do not think it'd be fair to overzealous picture snapping friends or, perhaps, fans of unborn fetuses who can accept Facebook friend invitations, to end the story there.
It is my contention that the powerful emergence of social media has been driven by a weird intersection of shortened attention spans and an individual desire to be seen, judged, and approved of by friends and strangers alike. Most interpersonal websites- Match.com, Facebook, whatever- seem to me to be simply vehicles selected by folks who, at least upon signing up, desire the sunglasses-on, top-down journey far more than the destination, whatever and wherever it may be. (Pay no attention to me writing an unedited, unsolicited blog accessible by anyone.) By signing up and opening yourself to a secondary world that feels more and more primary by the day (and advertisement and Tweet and Gchat "boing"), users not only give tacit approval to be pictured doing the reverse worm on a sticky club floor, they enjoy and even crave it. If they did not, they would shut their account down and the LinkedIn millionaires would be back at another angel investor conference as opposed to their recently purchased vacation homes in Maui. This, to me, is the ultimate juxtaposition: the cost benefit analysis of the potential to be immediately embarrassed versus an insatiable desire to be seen by the masses trumping the intimacy of the post-Thanksgiving living room and opting to leave that once pristine scene forever. Is this unattractive? Unwanted? Inevitable?
I guess it just depends on how much you like pumpkin pie.
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