Three years ago this month, Emily Nussbaum of NY Magazine used this as her subhead in the feature article, “Say Everything.”
“As younger people reveal their private lives on the Internet, the older generation looks on with alarm and misapprehension not seen since the early days of rock and roll. The future belongs to the uninhibited.”
But I do wonder if the revolution has been somewhat dramatized. I wonder how many words have been written about kids living out loud, uninhibited, sexting away our American, God-fearin’ moral fabric, leaving a thousand wrung hands from the trail of teen perversion brought from MySpace to Facebook and now to the mobile phone. And I wonder if this is a product of our inherent fear of change rather than something real.
Or as Douglas Adams said,
“Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
The problem, of course, is that I think we’re making rules based upon vocal anomalies rather than something more generically true. For the most part, young folks like their secrets. If for no other reason, to hide them from their parents. They try to obscure all the stupid crap they’re up to so as to not open themselves up to some old-fashioned parental backlash.
So while more words have been written about a generation spent sharing themselves to total strangers online, it merely covers up the more regular activity of being a normal kid. Either way, the actual shift might end up far more interesting than the headlines sometimes indicate.
Maybe we’ll still be influenced by a greater number of inputs, but we’ll learn to value those closest to us even more.
Maybe these closest few will be just as a handwritten note is to an email, far more important, meaningful and lasting.
As usual, most the old rules still apply. We value the scarce more than the ubiquitous. We value experiences over things. And I haven’t found much evidence that this will somehow stop being true.
(photo via yyellowbird - ps, she's got a ton of great stuff - check it out)
