Note: This is one of those classic whiny and introspective blog posts. Flee now!
I'm not the kind of woman who gets really worked up about Web 2.0's (is that what the kids really call it? I'm a senior in the bod of a lazy grad) invasion of privacy. If anything, I think that the new social relations make the conditional aspects of the construct of "privacy" a little more visible. No, what bothers me is the esteem issues that result from the invasion of privacy. Not my own privacy, mind, but the privacy of other people. You know what you realize when you can peek into the lives of other people? EVERYONE IS COOLER THAN YOU. Or at least, I've found that they're cooler than me.
I think I asked for this nasty realization once I predicated my Internet stalking on feelings of pique. It's like as soon as I start feeling bad about myself, I just want to check and make sure the feeling is completely justified. If a girl alienated me with her non-stop condescension, but she's up to all kind of cool shit that my old friends think is really great? You can bet I'm jealous and resentful, even though I'm the one who totally asked for it by seeking her out. Which both makes me sad on my own merits, and increases the gap between her and my post-uni, spinning the old mental wheels, self. Particularly since I'm repeating Hall and Oates vids on YouTube while I scroll through her tweets for some reason. Other things that mock me: relationship statuses, photo albums from exciting places, and messages on a best friend's wall from an assy twatwaffle that proves they're still on speaking terms.
But, if I have any hope for my technology-driven future, it's this post. Not just because in writing it, I've admitted to myself that humans are more complicated than the simple roles I want to assign them, and that most of them (even Herr Ass) mean well at the root of things. Or because I feel really bad about feeling petty and resentful. It's because, at some point, Facebook and Twitter and everything else make you confront what's shared and human in other people's lives. In their exhibition you find yourself mirrored, if occasionally distorted. So, I will point my narcissism away for a night, hopefully a week, and try to move on.
And, yeah, I never did sort through those New York pictures. But I did go and see UP, which was worth it for its nonstop adorableness. The self-pity express has steamed out of the station for now. Tomorrow's post promises to use no first person at all to prevent a repeat.
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