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!
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