inkbluesky

retro red 

Say Everything is an in depth eight page profile of the first real Internet Generation. Rather then snip a paragraph or two I’ll just put up some snips of some parts of that struck my attention,

- As younger people reveal their private lives on the Internet, the older generation looks on with alarm and misapprehension not seen since the early days of rock and roll. The future belongs to the uninhibited.

- Her Livejournal has gotten less personal over time, she tells me. At first it was “just a lot of day-to-day bullshit, quizzes and stuff,” but now she tries to “keep it concise to important events.” When I ask her how she thinks she’ll feel at 35, when her postings are a Google search away, she’s okay with that. “I’ll be proud!”

- You can see the evidence everywhere, from the rural 15-year-old who records videos for thousands of subscribers to the NYU students texting come-ons from beneath the bar. Even 9-year-olds have their own site, Club Penguin, to play games and plan parties. The change has rippled through pretty much every act of growing up.

- It’s been a long time since there was a true generation gap, perhaps 50 years—you have to go back to the early years of rock and roll, when old people still talked about “jungle rhythms.” Everything associated with that music and its greasy, shaggy culture felt baffling and divisive, from the crude slang to the dirty thoughts it was rumored to trigger in little girls. That musical divide has all but disappeared. But in the past ten years, a new set of values has sneaked in to take its place, erecting another barrier between young and old. And as it did in the fifties, the older generation has responded with a disgusted, dismissive squawk.

- When I was in high school, you’d have to be a megalomaniac or the most popular kid around to think of yourself as having a fan base. But people 25 and under are just being realistic when they think of themselves that way, says media researcher Danah Boyd, who calls the phenomenon “invisible audiences.”

- The biggest issue of living in public, of course, is simply that when people see you, they judge you. It’s no wonder Paris Hilton has become a peculiarly contemporary role model, blurring as she does the distinction between exposing oneself and being exposed, mortifying details spilling from her at regular intervals like hard candy from a piñata. She may not be likable, but she offers a perverse blueprint for surviving scandal: Just keep walking through those flames until you find a way to take them as a compliment.

This does not mean, as many an apocalyptic op-ed has suggested, that young people have no sense of shame. There’s a difference between being able to absorb embarrassment and not feeling it.

Most of us are aware that as humans we’re human centric. The cultural world revolves around us and we’re in control when actually the things we create whether its blogging or cell phones in turn change us. The article is mistaken for saying that the future, because of the net belongs to the outgoing and gregarious, it is just a form of media that is created by anyone that feels the desire to do so. You can have privacy on line if you choose to. The uninhibited have and always will find ways to express themselves. I think the real revolution is for people that are usually quiet or shy to be heard as clearly as those that would dominate the conversation in a social setting. Half the world’s population feels shy or awkward about public speaking, the net and self publishing tools gives them a voice that only needs a net connecti0on rather then a dose of Paxil. The shy tend to be more thoughtful in the literal sense of thinking things through, so they will ultimately be the standard on which cultural opinions deviate from, they will define the base. That is the real revolution. That people will ultimately be less embarrassed about their personal screw-ups is a good thing, we could do with less hypocrisy about our personal behavior. Maybe that will spill over into public policy and the powers that be will stop peaking into bedrooms because the shock value cease to be buttons that are so easily pushed. On the other hand public behavior can be scrutinized, discussed, and judgement passed faster then ever before and we’ll have a new age of real accountability - probably just wishful thinking on my part. Anyway go read the whole thing. We’re in one of those historic moments in culture and technology that the news media can’t capture in one minute of video tape like the moon landing or the Beatles coming to America, its something that is happening behind a few million computer monitors right now.

The Libby Trial Is Serious Business

Shame on The Post for publishing Victoria Toensing’s irrelevant opinings ["Trial in Error," Outlook, Feb. 18] as the case against I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby goes to the jury.

My issue is not legal. My issue is the extreme damage that occurs when CIA identities are bandied about by political hacks and the newspapers that cheer them on.

These leaks violate the code of blood honor of the CIA, MI-6, Mossad and every clandestine officer. Real people die. Real heroes are exposed and murdered. Real intelligence is lost. Real sources lose trust in our honor and refuse to cooperate. Real wars are fought mistakenly. Real troops are endangered. Real damage is done to U.S. credibility throughout the world.

War is not a dinner party for ideologues. Espionage is not a 007 movie. The lives of covert operatives are not petty cash to be bartered for spin.

The broadcast media are another reason for the explosion of the grassroots on the net. Today, like yesterday and the day before I saw hours of Britney’s haircut, a guy attacked by a shark ( news worthy, but not as much as it got), but nothing on the NSA scandal, the implications of grown men gossiping about a clandestine CIA officers identity, Bush’s attack on the separation of powers through signing statements, or the administration letting Afghanistan slip back into control of the Taliban.