Documenting the Self

Newsweek have an interesting article by Jennie Yabroff on what she terms the "Look At Me Generation". Yabroff talks about the differences between people born before and after the 1980s - those who are afraid of documentation and those who court it via flickr, myspace, You Tube, Facebook. She wonders, in her article, about the ill effects of such documentation on the youth of today: what does it do to our sense of privacy, does it engender the development of personas as opposed to personlities, what does it do to our sense of self, how do we really relate to others and develop trust?

I find myself occupying quite an interesting space when reading her article. I both self document ('publically' on my two blogs) and I document others through taking photographs of them. Is my personality compromised? Am I going to develop trust issues? Will my sense of self become emeshed in a cyberspace portrayal of who I am?

Unlike the kids of the 80s and beyond, I know that what I'm writing on my blogs is a represenation of certain aspects of my self. And I assume that the people (that little handful) who read what I have to say know that too. I know that until I've met someone my judgements on their trustworthiness are compromised precisely because of this partial representation of self that the net allows. And I know that I'm not that interested in spending hours creating and honing my online personality (or, in Yeboff's terms, is that persona?).

It is true that perhaps my knowing in all of these circumstances comes from the fact that I missed the 1980s time frame that Yabroff gives by a handful of years - my personality had time to form independently of the internet and cell phones and reality TV shows. But by the same token I do worry about some of the kids that I used to teach who spent about EIGHT hours a day playing WoW which in essence is just another form of self documentation - or self creation (where they found the time for eating, sleeping, socialising, school work . . . well, I suppose they didn't really). As I worry similarly about the kids who would rather sprout inanities and send round time wasting videos and quizzes on facebook, instead of actually spending time in the living, breathing company of friends.

But I also wonder about the potential for good that this self documentation holds. It puts us into a world where the private becomes public - a world where dirty little secrets have a habit of being placed in the public arena. A prospect that is shocking to some, but which also means that the power of the secret to shame and embarrass is lessened, even taken away. Imagine a world where abuse (particularly of children) is almos impossible because of the openess and forthrightness of society about such issues. (And cringe as I do to say this, Ricky Lake and Jerry Springer probably have a lot to do with the destruction of the veils of secrecy that traditionally shroud such issues).

I wonder too at the power of self documentation to help us shape our personalities / personsas (Yeboff sees them as seperate . . . but I'm not convinced that they are, or that we don't take what she sees as our personas into the 'real' world with us all the time) and to make meaning in our lives. I think of the kid who played eight hours of WoW a day. In 'real' life he was overweight and deaf in one ear. While immensely likeable and funny, the truth was that he was a bit of a non-entity in the social structure of the school. He played Warcraft because in that world, and to use his words, he was a god. The need for power and self aggrandisement aside, this is a world in which that boy felt needed. In which he had purpose. And if the counter argument here is that he is gaining those things from a world that isn't real . . . well, the counter to that is to ask: "How real is the rest of our life beyond the social value and meaning that we ascribe to it?".