Generation I

Welcome to the Information Age. In this glorious era, you’re guaranteed up-to-the-minute coverage of the latest election results, daily developments in Iraq, and the fact that at 8:43 p.m, things got complicated between Reese and Ryan (insert any broken-heart icon here).

To be honest, most of us don’t really need the welcome. We, the so-called “millennial” generation born between 1982 and 2000, have lived in the land of too-much-information for almost as long as we can remember. But in recent years, with the creation of networking sites like facebook.com and MySpace.com, the explosion of celebrity gossip blogs onto the Internet scene, and the increasing popularity of entertainment tabloids like Us Weekly, the information that we’re gaining and giving access to is becoming decidedly personal.

Sure, we often complain about the flood of all of this “unwanted” information about others’ lives onto our computer screens, but more often than not, our gripes ring hollow. The truth of the matter is, most of us don’t value our own or others’ privacy as much as we claim to. With PerezHilton.com getting millions of hits per day and the quick death of the facebook.com Mini-feed uproar, the proof is in the pudding.

The fact that we’re so eager and so easily able to find out everyone’s business makes clear the true driving force behind the deluge of previously private information: our generation’s culture revolves around the process of painstakingly constructing, dismantling, and constructing again the identities that we present for public consumption via facebook.com and MySpace. For many, the motivation seems to be to create an identity that appears more complex, serious, or just more likable than the real person behind the curtain. After all, when people quote John Stuart Mill in their profiles, list “The Art of War” as one of their favorite books, or oh-so-subtly write things like, “I’m a very complex person,” in their profiles, does anyone really believe them?

And it’s not just us little people on the Internet that seem to be swept up in this public identity construction crisis—the celebrities of our generation take the trend of living life out in the open to the extreme. Starlets like Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, with their public partying, frequently photographed nip-slips and shots of their nether-regions on days they, ahem, “coincidentally” decided to go commando, leave little to the public imagination. However, when they aren’t busy with these vital activities, famous millenials have turned television and magazine interviews into their makeshift facebook profiles, and take every opportunity to try to convey how complex they truly are. But did anyone buy it when Hilton told the British edition of GQ that she’s “very shy” or when Lohan discussed the complicated emotional introspection that she hopes to convey through her music in Vanity Fair? Or, as with the kid with the really profound-sounding facebook profile that we caught sleeping in Philosophy class but dancing on a table somewhere last Saturday night, do we walk away with the sense that the actual person and the façade they’re attempting to craft just don’t line up?

The problem with the public personas that celebrities and facebookers alike try to create for themselves is that they’re completely unstable. The frequency with which people update their facebook profiles is mind-boggling. We’re constantly adding quotes, subtracting interests, re-writing the “about me” blurb, and generally just trying to tweak the whole aura that we give off. Then there’s Hilton, who is a sex-tape kitten one minute and celibate the next. However, it’s extremely unlikely that some fundamental part of ourselves changes and requires redefinition as often as we claim.

Because they’re constantly in flux, the “identities” that we think we’re creating in these public spaces are ultimately meaningless. If one day you’re telling the world your life story, and how emotionally complex and introspective you are, and the next week you’re saying, “I’m a really laid-back kinda guy who likes to party—get at me,” ultimately you’ve shown everyone nothing, except perhaps that you’re really confused.

Of course, this isn’t to say that people can’t have multi-faceted personalities and changing moods. After all, the constantly changing profiles might just be a reflection of those less static characteristics. And for the celebrity extremists of our generation, the periodic reinvention of the self may, apart from garnering them the attention they crave, just come as a natural requirement of their “jobs” if they hope to stay relevant and interesting to the prying masses.

But if our generation attaches such great importance to self-definition, there must be better mediums to achieve that than facebook and “People” magazine. For starters, perhaps we, the not-so-famous, could focus more attention on living and doing things in real life, rather than posting our musings on ourselves and our “lives” in a note and hoping everyone reads it when it shows up on mini-feed. After all, as one of my favorite sayings goes, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” See, look at that! Aren’t I deep?



Ashton R. Lattimore ’08 is an English concentrator in Dunster House. Her column appears on alternate Wednesdays.