I have no doubt that our generation is fraked. Our parents had it pretty easy...Oh sure, when they were are age they had to walk miles in the snow just to get to school, they had to work for their allowance, they even had to write their homework by hand! The horror! But us, well when they were our age, facebook wasn't even invented yet!
Now I am hesitant to throw facebook in the spotlight again as its popularity is growing perfectly in sync with its opposition, but it serves the purpose, and I can't possibly advertise myspace (that's so five years ago). Facebook has become a buzzword, even our parents are starting to catch on, (although the blank look on my parents' faces every time I try to explain just what a "social networking site" is, or a friend's mom refers to "facewall" makes me wonder just how much they get it), and as with all trends, a hipper crowd emerges that pretends to be above it. I was among the last of my friends to join as I too was weary of the value of a tool that would allow old nemeses from high school to find out how little I've done with my life. We all know the reasons people claim to be holding out, but the thing that they're missing is that whether or not you sign-up and login, facebook, myspace, msn, these are things that define not only our generation, but our day to day lives.
Our generation is doomed, if for no other reason than our inability to live in anything but the immediate, the now. To be sure, we have our goals and dreams, but even in our consideration of our futures, we are forced to consider whether those pictures from the party last night might be seen by future employers, or how quickly what we said about a friend in a moment of frustration is copied and pasted into another chat window. Our words can be thrown back at us months later, old squabbles better off forgotten, rehashed at a moment's notice thanks to archived conversations. This idea that everything we say and do continues to exist in the alternate, but very real, universe, forces us to develop a permanent awareness of even the most innocent remarks or actions and how they may be perceived by someone who was not there. Even mundane debates grow to epic proportions as we are soon forced to vehemently defend positions we took on a whim, or facts we pulled out of our ass with the ever-looming threat of wikipedia hanging over our heads (though I maintain that any encyclopedia which defines ass scorpions is not a legitimate reference source).
The point is this. The accesibility of everything, of being able to get what we want the second we want it, of being able to know what happened last night at 7:18a.m. the next day, of being able to know within minutes when people break up, all of these things make the present that much more of a priority than the future. I mean, how can we be expected to plan for our future without knowing whether or not our whitty remark was liked or retweeted or whether Jenny made it to the gym today...My advice? Well, for all of this, I don't see the problem. The options are to permanently censor yourself, make sure everyone only ever sees the best side of you, or, to just go with it. Sure you should probably check your privacy settings once in a while to make sure you aren't tagged in anything too inappropriate, and maybe you should rethink that late night tweet that might not be quite as witty in the morning, but trying to fight it can be more time consuming than going with it.
