Am I an old person?

In a generation though bred in a world were more and more people putting their private lives on the internet and living a private life in the public sphere has become acceptable, if not desirable (think the real world, or other reality shows of the sort) is it still considered voyeurism?

More and more my thoughts on this are changing. I guess I used to be “old school” in that I did think that this was bad, that I was the only one who cared about privacy, that I was scared for those vulnerable to all the evils of the net. As I think and write, my views are changing. Just because I don’t like giving the online world constant updates doesn’t mean that someone can’t want to.

The New York Magazine we read, “Say Everything” (http://nymag.com/news/features/27341), Emma Nussbaum illustrates the differences between generations. Honestly, at first it kind of made me feel old, for I understand and to some extent agreed with the views that willingly keeping your private life public was kind of unsettling. In an alternate reality, I could envision a bitter version of myself saying:

“Kids today. They have no sense of shame. They have no sense of privacy. They are show-offs, fame whores, pornographic little loons who post their diaries, their phone numbers, their stupid poetry—for God’s sake, their dirty photos!—online. They have virtual friends instead of real ones. They talk in illiterate instant messages. They are interested only in attention—and yet they have zero attention span, flitting like hummingbirds from one virtual stage to another.” (this an example of the “dismissive squawk” of the older generation, as Nussbaum puts it)

But the 3 changes, between my generation and the “older” generation, she gives all are things I either positively attribute to myself, or am trying to do: that they think of themselves as having an audience, they have archived their adolescence and that their skin is thicker than ours. – I think that the ability for people to gain an audience (which starts by people thinking they will have an audience) willl open up avenues of creativity: we are a generation that does not suffer from stage fright. Archiving ones adolescence is a no brainer: how many times have you looked back and wished you had some kind of record or pictures or what you had done (or simply the person you have grown out of? Finally, having thick skin: The ability to laugh at oneself and to roll with the punches. We feel embarrassment but absorb it, allowing the ability to take more chances, even at the risk of failure.

Now don’t get me wrong, all the fear from my previous post still exist but most, if not all, of those fears stem from being an older brother. My fear for the sanctity of my sister aside, I don’t see these changes between generations as detrimental to society. I would go as far as to say they make our generation better, but at the very least unique.