I have tried to diversify from just hanging out in one intelligent forum - and go to My Space, and Tribe, and a couple of other online forums - but it feels like trying to befriend (or at least care about) everyone at a rock concert. I can't do it. I have enough trouble acting nice to one new person met in a bar. So much of the online social networking arises from a younger crowd, anyway, so the games of 'You've Been Framed' self-videoing do not remind me of when I reached that same age as film and sound recording seemed hard and expensive back then - the brief air guitar in front of the mirror phase can now get passed to posterity.
I don't think I should just blame my age though. Just as tv news exposed my whole generation to a close-up view of other life-styles and events on the planet, so these later generations have both the tv and the internet - plus they don't only see the newscasts selected for our instruction by 'authorities and experts and journalists', but can make their own...
How many cute videos of someone's cat falling over, or of wild and crazy kids doing ultimate pogo stick, or whatever can you watch? Parallel to cctv recording a great deal of our street life, more and more cameras (on phones, etc) observe and record the world from every angle. In sports, cameras end up in helmets, cricket stumps, helicopters and air balloons, they can zoom in and out, and then the editing suite can cut and paste and interactive tv can offer you all the camera-shots that previously they only saw in the production gallery, etc.
The recursive nature of people taking pictures of people taking pictures, and the sensation that more and more of the world can get played back, seems to have changed quite a lot of our perceptions of the world...unfortunately, the ability to forget and move on may disappear. The Big Brother fear of surveillance and reality video 'evidence' gets balanced by the self-publicising aspect, and the photoshop FX thing - don't believe everything you see...
1 comment:
Hallelulya
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