I once overheard a young inebriated woman on the subway around 2am state that “the real world is where you take pictures for Facebook.” She was, I thought, the smartest person on that train. http://thesocietyp...arts-i-ii-and-iii/ I quite like this series of posts. (Be sure to read parts 2 & 3)
Here's my take on some of the concepts briefly discussed within.
I am part of a generation that has been documented extensively since birth.
Sitting in boxes in my parents' house are hours and hours of tapes of me and my brother throughout our childhood. Like most home movies, they are not entirely an accurate portrayal of
how things were; they are simply the selection of orchestrated moments that my parents chose to have committed to this second order digital memory. Most of the clips are staged performances and awkward, stilted interviews- an outsider's perspective of the way we behaved. There are candid observations from far away, but whenever the camera is nearby, our behavior instantly shapes itself out of a desire to impress future viewers and conceal what we don't want recorded.
Perhaps as a result of this use of technology, my generation has taken to heart this arbiter, this constant watchful eye, in its new incarnation of digital social media. We have engineered versions of ourselves to present to the "world" of various social networking sites. We are obsessed with "documenting" that which is arguably less of a reality and more of a series of idealized and enhanced memories. We are manufacturing our own rose-colored glasses.
Near the end of my high school years I became acutely aware of a feeling that I could only describe at the time as being nostalgic for moments while they were still occurring. It might seem like an odd concept, but for me it was just the feeling of being outside myself, and the notion that my current experiences were going to be over, never to be replicated.
In our search for the real and meaningful, we are turning further and further away from it. We're erasing the significance of the present by the very act of documenting it. It's becoming too easy to create without thinking, and this hybrid of documentation and art retains the positive qualities of neither.
Thoughts?