Posted by
Jennifer P on Saturday, August 18, 2007 10:14:08 PM
I recently read a book called Mortified: Real Words. Real People. Real Pathetic.
by David Nadelberg. It's a collection of embarrassing childhood diary
entries, love letters, pictures drawn, and dirty stories written by
twelve year-olds and adolescents with only a notional idea about sex.
Anybody that reads these and remembers anything about stories they
penned as a kid will be instantly pricked with a sense of humiliation
as a long-forgotten, unwelcome memory comes flooding back to remind
them of how ridiculous they actually were sometimes.
I recall a
time when I was three or four years-old and I went through a phase
where I kept drawing "anatomically correct" bunny rabbits. I can't
imagine what my preschool teacher must have thought. I don't know what
made me fixate on this subject for my pictures, but likely it was
something rather mundane. At that time, my mom had bought me a book
about the human body written for younger children. It was illustrated
in bright colors and had a few pages dedicated to human reproduction.
Of course the book was written for a younger child--not enough detail
to tell you how IT really happens, but enough to let you know that you
weren't brought by the stork. IT still had that aura of mystery.
Looking back, it all seems so Freudian. How weirdly ironic that as a
four-year old I connected the most basic human act with an animal known
primarily for its prolific reproduction and in bygone years, a
pregnancy test.
When I was in high school, I discovered that my
mom had saved these masterpieces, I was horrified. I begged her to
throw them out. I was certain I would have died of embarrassment if
anybody had ever seen them. These were just pictures I drew as a four year-old--not pictures of me, but never in a million years would I have
posted them where people could see them. That's the way diaries and
secrets used to be and there used to be a term for pictures of people
in compromising positions: blackmail photos.
So why do people
these days feel compelled to post their deepest secrets and humiliating
pictures on the web for the world to see? It's coming back to bite them
in the butt. A young woman who graduated from teacher's college was
denied her teaching certificate by the state when they discovered
compromising pictures on her blog. She's not the only one. Employers
commonly look for potential employees' blogs and websites and they're
not hiring people who post pictures of themselves in their most risque
moments. Of course in retrospect, the bunny pictures are pretty tame and I can laugh about it now, but I still wouldn't make it a point to post them publicly if I happened to be in the market for a job.
It's not just cyberspace either. We live in a voyeuristic
society. Look at the glut of reality shows. In spite of their different
formats they all have one common denominator--LOOK AT ME!
In
spite of the fact that we have more information at our fingertips and
more ways to connect with the world around us than ever before, we're
more cut off from each other than at any other time in human history. I
walked into Panera Bread one day and witnessed three or four people
sitting at a table together. They were all working on their own laptops
completely disengaged from each other. Together, but still alone.
Not
only has cable TV, video games, and the internet contributed to a
society of sedentary couch potatoes, they've made the world a lonely
place. We now have a generation of people who have no idea how to
connect and desperately want to. People want to be known and the only
way they think they can make that happen is through message boards,
forums, blogs, and the ubiquitous You Tube. Obviously, I have nothing against these things personally--after all, I have three blogs, but they're hardly a suitable substitute for real
relationships. Now we have a world of people screaming LOOK AT ME!