It's been a while since I read a piece that split me down the middle. Such was the case with Emily Nussbaum's "Say Everything," in this week's New York magazine. Nussbaum details what she calls the new generation gap: kids, teenagers and 20somethings who think nothing of baring it all online (sometimes literally), and their horrified elders who think armies of anonymous perverts are ready to pounce. This gap, Nussbaum writes, may have been years in the making:
It’s hard to pinpoint when the change began. Was it 1992, the first season of The Real World? (Or maybe the third season, when cast members began to play to the cameras? Or the seventh, at which point the seven strangers were so media-savvy there was little difference between their being totally self-conscious and utterly unself-conscious?) Or you could peg the true beginning as that primal national drama of the Paris Hilton sex tape, those strange weeks in 2004 when what initially struck me as a genuine and indelible humiliation—the kind of thing that lost former Miss America Vanessa Williams her crown twenty years earlier—transformed, in a matter of days, from a shocker into no big deal, and then into just another piece of publicity, and then into a kind of power.I'm torn because on one hand, I keep a blog. Thus, baring part of myself to the three (maybe four, if you count Brian Hickey) people who read this blog. And I read a lot of blogs, mostly to get to know other people. I'll never forget the strange sensation at Bouchercon '05 when I sat in the hotel bar, surrounded by people I knew well but had never actually met. And just last week, Daniel Hatadi launched the very cool Crimespace, meant as an online meeting place of people who dig crime and mystery. It's like a Bouchercon without the airfare.
In other words: I think the internets is cool.
On the other hand, as a parent, I can understand the whole "horrified" thing. I never post photos of my son Parker or daughter Sarah online. I rarely discuss my family or day job here (at least, in any real detail). In fact, it's a pretty narrow focus here at Secret Dead Blog: books, writing, and other assorted geekery. There is a photo of me in the upper left-hand corner. And if you check my profile page, you know my age, astrological sign, gender, and weird affinity for RoboCop. But that's it. Only a tiny sliver of ol' Swierczy. Sharing anything more feels... well, weird.
So there you have it. I'm straddling the new generation gap like a drunk Philly cop on a Sybian.
What about you guys? Which side of the gap do you fall?
I think you just have to be smart about it. There are things about me you'll never know. You don't see the outside of my house online. The only pictures of my wife are from almost 20 years ago. I'd never post my kids' photos online, if I had any.
ReplyDeleteOTOH, I do think a lot of the sheer terror surrounding MySpace is largely hysteria. The same people panicking over the bird flu will sneeze all over your food at lunch. People who bemoan that the terrorists are coming will wreck their cars while talking about it on their cell phones on the freeway.
I am going to need a whole bucket of Clorox and a wire brush to get that last image out of my head. (shudder)
ReplyDeleteI am torn between embracing every technological cookie that comes along and fleeing in luddite terror.
The interweb is candy coated chocolate smack for information junkies. It never stops changing. Anonymity, 'nuff said. Old men alternately fear it and want to control it. But the web's champions are all young, look at Google, Facebook, and MySpace.
Plus, there is a dark seedy underbelly. Phishing. Nigerian Bank scam e-mails. Russian syndicates cracking into financial institutions for credit cards.
Every generation finds a demarcation from the previous. Every generation likes to taunt their elders from the safety of the other side of that line.
I don't really see any problem with my privacy. I wouldn't post anything that I wouldn't tell someone in a public bar. Those who have met me know that I usually start talking about my kids almost immeditately. I can't see how my internet presence threatens me or my family.
ReplyDeleteI've posted pictures of my kids on my blog. If I had one of them digital camera things, I would probably post a whole lot more. What's to worry about? Some pervert might look at pictures of my kids? Some pervert might live next door to me. I have no control over that.
Now, that said, I also don't allow my kids unrestricted access to the internet. My twelve and thriteen year old are only allowed online to do school stuff. As they get a little older, I'll give them more and more leeway, but even then, I wouldn't be a good parent if I wasn't paying attention to what they're doing. My kids don't lock themselves in their room with their own TV, internet access, ipod, etc, etc. It might sound corny, but we work at developing a strong sense of togetherness. We all just don't live in the same house and do our own separate thing. We are all intimately involved in each other's lives. So far it's worked pretty well (one almost grown teenager, she's 19, and two more just starting out).
I'm just not sure what you're so worried about. Is it just a privacy issue? That's fine. If you don't want people knowing personal details about your life, then you shouldn't post that kind of stuff. I just don't see any danger in it.
I don't have kids and I'm a rather selfish narcissistic bastard so I definately fall on the "say anything" side of the gap. I routinely delete posts after rethinking them several days (or months) later, but even the stuff I keep up is more than most people would say.
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty much in favor of saying what you want on your blog or on the web in general. On the other hand, don't share what you don't want anyone else to know. Not a particularly original concept, but common sense is often a scarce commodity.
ReplyDeleteKids online are gonna do stupid shit. They're kids, right? Doing stupid shit is kinda in the job description of being a kid. The parents' job is to monitor their kids. Of course, some parents haven't grown out of the doin' stupid shit phase themselves, so that leaves a fair number of kids who now have the means to share their stupidity with millions of people. No easy answers on how to deal with that one.
As for posting pics of your kids online...don't do it. Computer generated kiddie porn is a big deal. Do you really want to risk someone lifting the image of your child's face and photoshop-ing it into a porn flick? It happens, and the laws are sketchy, still trying to sort out how to deal with cg porn. I'm just saying...
I usually fall to the side by the men's cargo pants and tee's.
ReplyDeleteI have a confession. The guy who writes A Dark Planet, and the guy who goes home to his wife every night, are different people.
ReplyDeleteYes, they have a lot in common, but they are not the same. The man who writes A Dark Planet is a fictional creature. He has to be. I couldn't drink as much as he does.
That said, I have revealed a few things that I knew were a bit risky, but what the hell is life without risk?
I recently wasted several hours of my life on a right wing blog arguing with people who think George Bush is doing a bang-up job.
Why? I don't know. But along the way, I gave several of them a hard time for hiding behind Internet anonymity with pseudonyms.
Most of us use our real names, and that does open us up for some risk. Just from blogs, I know who you are and where you live. Finding your address doesn't take Kojak.
And I did post my address once. I thought long and hard about doing it, but since it was an appeal to send me books that I could then send to troops in Iraq, the benefit outweighed the very slim potential of some psycho reading The Planet and then hunting me down because I said George Bush is gay.
I believe that people died for my First Amendment rights, so I'm at least brave enough to use them.
A friend once asked (after my post on pubic shaving) if there were any topics I wouldn't blog on. I told him there were volumes of things I wouldn't write about and you can probably guess what they are - family, job, co-workers, etc.
Everything cultural or politcial is fair game, but personal is off limits.
Unless it's entertaining. Then that guy who writes A Dark Planet takes over and I never know what he's going to say.
That guy is fucking crazy.
It's a tough call. It took me a long time to finally say to hell with it and use my real name online. People can find you if they really want to. Hell, for fifty bucks I can get your last 4 known addresses, criminal records, neighbor's names, relatives names, satellite photos and god knows what else.
ReplyDeleteSo, yeah, it's goddamn scary. But it's also the direction, like it or not, that our world is going. It's not the end of privacy, but it's certainly the blurring of private and public, or at least the perception of them. I can still do things in private that, provided I and the others involved (especially the guy with the donkey) don't blab, will never be known about in the wide world.
Our online personalities are thin slices of who we are in the real world. I'm not nearly as angry and psychotic as I come across on my blog. Well, okay, maybe I am, but the point is that there's a lot more to my life than what gets presented online.
I've known more than a few people who have met people online and fallen in love with the idea of an online persona. Then they meet in real life and the realities of the other person's body odor, the fact that they snore, look worse than their picture, or are just really bad in bed, come crashing into the fantasy. Online all we are are caricatures of ourselves.
Used to be details of our lives were a walk to County Records and a couple of phone calls away. Now they're a mouse click and a credit card. The only saving grace for me is that I'm not much of a target. I'm not rich, famous or running for office. Nobody cares if I'm found tied up naked with a ballgag, or gossipping about Lindsay Lohan in some bar on Sunset. For all the public scrutiny available, I'm still just a nobody.
I'm with you Mr Swierczynski (just because it's the interweb, doesn't mean we can't be polite) I only put out there what I'm comfortable with people knowing. And even then, half of what I blog is outright lies.
ReplyDeleteI won't even give people I know my address, let alone post it online.
I know a lot of people think "what's the harm in someone finding out?", but as soon as you stick your head above the parapet - by getting a book published, for example - all manner of strange people come out of the woodwork.
Since I got published my relatives have been approached by complete strangers looking for my address and phone number.
Ah, the joys...
I keep a blog, and I write what I feel, but I don't post pictures. I write about my daughter, but it's to get a flavor for my life; I approach it and perceive my blog to be a vignette of what it's like to be a single Mom in Philadelphia.
ReplyDeleteI've written a few risque posts, but they were what (or who--heh, couldn't resist) I was feeling at the time.
There are limits--I don't use people's real names. I've scared off a few guys because of my blog--or at least made them uncomfortable that I might write about them. I never approach my blog as a tell-all. I tell enough, and I am smart about it.
Of course I don't write about work--the whole Dooce thing scares me (the blogger who got fired for writing).
I write about political topics sometimes, but mostly I write about what's going on in my head...and that's crazy.
I think we're all wrapped up in our own fears. Is it internet privacy we really dread? Our info is available. Where we live, our last credit card transaction, where and when we used EZ Pass.
ReplyDeleteCultural change breeds hysteria. Painters went nuts when Daguerre invented photography. Us photographers went nuts when the digital camera arrived. People freaked out when the train was invented. With a new generation growing up on line these fears will be washed away.
I have a 10 month old daughter. Do I fear pedophiles and stalkers? Sure I do. But I'd feel the same fear if the internet didn't exist. I live in Philadelphia. We're not isolated on a farm in Montana. And does that even make a difference anymore? After the Amish school shooting one has to wonder if a safe haven from society exists.
School violence, guns, US foreign policy. These I fear for my children. The internet? Not so much. The anxiety will pass. I hope I can say the same thing about gun violence one day.