Shaken, Not Stirred
mromero@theguidon.com
I love gadgets and technology. Whenever a new technology comes along, I always make it a point to get the latest details on what it can do. These days, technology engulfs our whole generation. Gone are the days when we desire gadgets for what they can do for us. Today, we rave about these technological products and services for what they can do to us.
Most of us, if not everyone, are part of a virtual community. Some have an account on Facebook, Multiply, MySpace, or the perennial Friendster. Others have multiple accounts on all these social networking sites. I am part of Multiply and am an inactive member of Friendster. As for Facebook, I have no plans of joining… for now.
What’s special in these sites is that they bring you, your friends, their friends and so on, to one place where everyone can interact – one big social web. Everyone can upload their pictures and videos, some blog and even upload their own songs. The World Wide Web has really made social discovery, exploration, and interaction a tad more interesting and fun.
However, though these technologies extend the sense of self. In a way, the very means of extending one’s self through videos and blogs amputates the self. We are able to compartmentalize ourselves and choose to showcase what we only want the rest of the virtual world to see.
The human person can now fluidly experiment different “selves” through the internet. In the Internet, the nottie can seem like a hottie, the geek a jock, and Juan can be known as John.
These days, technology is no longer a gift for the privileged few. It is an essential part of everyday life. For sure, there isn’t a day that passes by without us using YouTube, our blogs, or iPods. Such technologies have become links to our selves – YouTube for the struggling director, the blog for the striving writer, and iPods for the music enthusiast. We live in a society and generation that revolves around the self.
Television shows like Gossip Girl have been able to encapsulate our technologically-hyped “Me – Generation” in a nutshell. Instead of a rumor-mongering girl reporting our day-to-day activities over the internet, we ourselves spill the 411 about us for the world to read, see, and hear. Of course, this doesn’t get published or accessed without further tweaking, designed to make us far more interesting than our normal selves.
In a talk about storytelling I went to for my Sociology and Anthropology class, we talked about how we tell stories because we want to feel empowered. What goes on in the World Wide Web is all about storytelling, from the self to the other. Extending the perspective of self cannot be done without the existence of the other. We make use of the other’s existence as our audience for self-empowerment. We tell them our stories so that we feel better about ourselves.
Self-empowerment through the use of the Internet in this day and age is prevalent in the World Wide Web. In a sense, we become our own heroes – fighting the beasts of our stress-filled lives. At the end of the day, we tell stories because we want to feel better and, sometimes, these emotions are so hard to contain that we just have to let them out.
