Thursday, February 8, 2007
We Have the Internet to Rebuild Us: Why Our Generation Does it Better in Public
filed under: Dating 2.0, We Are The Sex Media by Melissa Gira
There’s so much to return to and do a (as my favorite sex profs said in University) deep reading of in this feature from this week’s New York magazine, Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy — which so touches (in all the right ways) on the sex & the internet zeitgeist we’ve been trying to track here…
on how the Internet drives Dating 2.0:
Go through your first big breakup and you may need to change your status on Facebook from “In a relationship” to “Single.” Everyone will see it on your “feed,” including your ex, and that’s part of the point.
on the Future of Sexual Privacy when it comes to confessional blogging and perhaps the final death blow to the “cult of true womanhood”:
For someone like me, who grew up sealing my diary with a literal lock, this may be tough to accept. But under current circumstances, a defiant belief in holding things close to your chest might not be high-minded. It might be an artifact - quaint and naive, like a determined faith that virginity keeps ladies pure. Or at least that might be true for someone who has grown up “putting themselves out there” and found that the benefits of being transparent make the risks worth it.
on the crumbling of the Pink Ghetto in the increasing no-big-deal of Internet nakedness (but still I gotta go, “so, what does doing ‘it’ for your boyfriend have to do with it?”):
[… Xiyin muses,] “So I am a sexual person and I shouldn’t have to hide my sexuality. I did this for my boyfriend just like you probably do this for your boyfriend, just that yours is not published. But to me, it’s all the same. It’s either documented online for other people to see or it’s not, but either way you’re still doing it. So my philosophy is, why hide it?”
and on possibly the most promising of Sex Hacks when it comes to how we communicate, how we feel, and by extension, how we (can, do, will) fuck:
[Clay] Shirky describes this generational shift in terms of pidgin versus Creole. “Do you know that distinction? Pidgin is what gets spoken when people patch things together from different languages, so it serves well enough to communicate. But Creole is what the children speak, the children of pidgin speakers. They impose rules and structure, which makes the Creole language completely coherent and expressive, on par with any language. What we are witnessing is the Creolization of media.”
That’s a cool metaphor, I respond. “I actually don’t think it’s a metaphor,” he says. “I think there may actually be real neurological changes involved.”
Be still my theory heart.
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One of my friends was horrified by this article, and by the idea of a devaluation of privacy.
I’m still processing my response to it all.
I think, for me, the attraction of living in public runs somewhere along the lines of turning my life into art. Something along the lines of the unexamined life not being worth living: as I reconstruct my experiences, writing and photographing and shaping them through my postings on the Internet, they somehow become richer, deeper, more intense.
Do I need an audience to do this processing? Perhaps not, but the interaction of other people adds another, richer layer.
I’m totally in love with the article, for a lot of reasons. One, it doesn’t fall back on some predictable, easy explanation of online revelation — it doesn’t even cop to “all the young dudes, getting exhibitionistic on the tubes” rhetoric. It quotes danah and Clay both. It squarely puts the power question on the table — that there is a power in this being public, and no, not a 90’s girl power (it is so mostly women looked at here). Facile empowerment this is not. It is power, and a power we’re rewiring ourselves towards.
I read this and can almost track this conversation — of power, identity, performance, branding, mobile computing, everyware, surveillance — and how it’s moved across blogs to bring us to this moment where we can embrace the messy Now of how we use the Internet. I welcome that messiness. Maybe that’s been the point all along?
(I love that we’re having this conversation out in the Comments, rather than IM. Ha!)
heh. I’m glad you wrote about this; when I read it I wondered among other things what your reaction to it would be and if you would write about it here. The article brought up a lot of issues and questions for me and I think I’m still working it out.
What it boils down to, I think, is that I think the freedom to do something is just as important as the freedom to NOT do something. Mostly I worry that it is becoming increasingly impossible to maintain any boundaries at all.