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The Curator Generation?
Mar. 8th, 2007 08:32 amInteresting piece in New York Magazine this week on the phenomenon of living your life online.
Descriptive piece mostly showcasing the usual photogenic suspects, young adult curators of MySpaces, Xangas, Facebooks and LiveJournals innumerable (not to mention gigabytes of instant messages which alas! due to their ephemeral nature will never find a home in the great Google museum.)
But hidden among the overly effulgent prose were a couple of really intriguing insights, to wit: people between 16 and 25 (a group still – sadly – without its own catchy generational descriptor) are living their lives for their fan base, the twenty-five or fifty or hundred or so people signed on to their Friends lists:
Fascinating.
I was an early Internet adaptor myself and have been keeping an online journal in some form or another for close to fifteen years now. But for me, there's always been a sizeable disconnect between my Real Life friends and the Imaginary Playmates Who Live In My Computer, my model being less Paris Hilton and more Rebirth, John Wyndham's pulp sci fi novel about telepaths living in post-apocalyptic Nova Scotia. There's something very delicious to me in the thought that there are people wandering around whose psychological profiles are very, very familiar but whom I would not recognize if I passed on the street, sort of as though they're characters that escaped from a novel in my head.
Also, I see I am very behind the curve because I am not posting actual figures documenting each bump in the rocky salaam towards financial ruin like the guy who runs www.Iamfacingforeclosure.com…
Descriptive piece mostly showcasing the usual photogenic suspects, young adult curators of MySpaces, Xangas, Facebooks and LiveJournals innumerable (not to mention gigabytes of instant messages which alas! due to their ephemeral nature will never find a home in the great Google museum.)
But hidden among the overly effulgent prose were a couple of really intriguing insights, to wit: people between 16 and 25 (a group still – sadly – without its own catchy generational descriptor) are living their lives for their fan base, the twenty-five or fifty or hundred or so people signed on to their Friends lists:
In essence, every young person in America has become, in the literal sense, a public figure. And so they have adopted the skills that celebrities learn in order not to go crazy: enjoying the attention instead of fighting it—and doing their own publicity before somebody does it for them.
Fascinating.
I was an early Internet adaptor myself and have been keeping an online journal in some form or another for close to fifteen years now. But for me, there's always been a sizeable disconnect between my Real Life friends and the Imaginary Playmates Who Live In My Computer, my model being less Paris Hilton and more Rebirth, John Wyndham's pulp sci fi novel about telepaths living in post-apocalyptic Nova Scotia. There's something very delicious to me in the thought that there are people wandering around whose psychological profiles are very, very familiar but whom I would not recognize if I passed on the street, sort of as though they're characters that escaped from a novel in my head.
Also, I see I am very behind the curve because I am not posting actual figures documenting each bump in the rocky salaam towards financial ruin like the guy who runs www.Iamfacingforeclosure.com…
