Welcome to the Neighbourhood
March 22nd, 2009 by Chantelle Oliver | 2 Comments »
My whole life is online. Pictures of me. My obsessions and disasters. It hasn’t happened overnight. Over the past 17 years I have emerged piecemeal online. Beginning with intimate stories published when I was in high school, my life online began as a genuflection to a medium I was in awe of and erratically evolved into what it is today: home.
Just last week a friend bemoaned the unfortunate condition of me living my life online. The concern was that I was afforded no privacy about various details of my life. Between my blog, Twitter and the butterfly effect as my life is linked and retweeted, I could not dispute the facts of his concern.
But my so-called unfortunate condition only appears unfortunate because I am that rarefied elite known as the vanguard. According to Neilsen’s Twitter had a 1382% growth rate in February 2009. According to me, the way I live my life online is merely trendsetting and not exactly unfortunate. Each passing month a new army of people are broadening their contexts for communication and evolving too by tweeting their ideas, photos and pithy commentary. Soon, sadly, I will be nothing more than another average person with only this blog to evidence my past vanguardism. All I will be left with are my fantastic cutting-edge blouses.
My unfortunate gender compounds many a concern about my life online. Perhaps, it is argued, posting photos of myself online will get me into trouble. And if I complain about this attention I am a fool because I only have myself to blame. This is akin to blaming me for being raped for wearing a lascivious outfit! Which I have been known to do. Like the physical streets where I walk I have a right to appear in all visual variations of myself online without recrimination. I don’t wear a Mormon dress to appear asexual on city street. Neither will I appear in such attire in images online (well, not often) and cede this battle with patriarchy. Unfortunately, the internets did not obliterate patriarchy. But they did not create patriarchy either. It only provides sexism, classism, racism and homophobia a new landscape to colonize.
My home is any place I am with family and friends and other people I have relationships with. It is not a physical space I inhabit or a building but a context forded and suspended upon human interactions and the processes, understandings and ideas that get produced along the way. Therefore, it is not an unfortunate condition that I live my life online but merely a statement of necessary and obvious fact. The internets are my home. Welcome to the neighbourhood!
Making your life public means taking ownership and recognizing that as in ‘real life’, our actions have consequences. A more healthy attitude would be to actually address the potential harm in having indiscriminate bits of yourself hanging out online, just as it is harmful when that happens in real life. (For example, I have no sympathy for people who bemoan embarrassing pictures taken of them at parties. Take some responsibility folks, what are we, perpetually 12?)The wrong attitude is the one I read here: it’s my life, I’m on the cutting edge, everyone will be doing this and loving it before you know it! So called consequences are just the protests of the ignorant and the backward.
They said the same thing about fast food restaurants sure, no doubt.
Dear Margism:
I am perpetually 12! You’ve hit the nail on the head. Everyone blogging and Twittering, especially women who post pictures, are actually just in an arrested stage of development. I’ve been awaiting such insights!
Indiscriminate bits? I am very discriminating. Just as I carefully choose what I wear or say to my neighbours and don’t stumble out the door in slips cursing wildly, I have a highly honed skill for picking out my expression of self online. I get dressed. I have polite conversation. I Twitter and article. I blog an analysis of electronic communication technology. You have what I find to be an indecipherable boundary between kinds of communication. What happens in my physical world and online have merged, by the way.
In Toronto of 1852 the Journeymen Tailors’ Operative society struck to persuade a local firm to get rid of its new sewing-machine. They referred to sewing machines as fiends that had come among them, like the steam engine and other implements of evil, seeking to exterminate their whole craft. Since you share their foresight and ability to contextualize historically perhaps you will share in their fate: On November 7, 1854 the tailors were found guilty of conspiracy and their society was dissolved.*
*Working People: An Illustrated History of the Canadian Labour Movement
By Desmond Morton, pg 13