What would Andy make of it?

All this space to unleash yourself is very daunting- my(own)space, you(me)tube- the whole world is a stage, as well as the cast and the audience whether it be one person to another or one to a million. Its enough to make you run for the hills, where there’s no wi-fi, fast download or roaming capabilities, unless you prefer the hiking variety. Everyone seems to have acquired this comfort in logging on and expressing everything be it their heartbreaks or hobbies from a necessary spotlight -a well lit computer screen, with a webcam for the ultra sophisticated.

I’ve noticed that when a camera goes off at some hipster hangout on a NYC Friday night, the now dated sound of a lightbulb smashing or even flash battery wheeling has been replaced with “Oh you so have to put that up on facebook!’ Click and flash have all gone cyber. Everyone else needs to see it, everyone needs to see how much fun we’re having, which means we must be having fun. We know we’re being watched, we’re watching others, and you yourself want to be watched. The digital age seems to have forced the experience of being self-conscious and being self-aware into becoming two separate things entirely.

The 80s and 90s was my right of teenage passage, racked with the necessary intense self analysis and angst. The MTV generation, we were still in our relatively secluded microcosms. I remember desperately wanting to run away to Seattle to find Kurt Cobain and become a Nirvana cheerleader but London and its Parklife, Common People and me as a Sleeper girl was still an envious place to be. I remember there some hang-outs we could sneak into, with no red rope or ghastly guest list, and see everyone who in those formative years were our idols, but you had to be part of the fabric to know they were even there. Ten years later and you can hit the google fast track and with little trouble you’ll not only have a satellite location, but the paparazzi will have provided you with welcome evidence and street shots of the crowd on probably every Friday night for the last year. Even the guy who habitually falls out of the bar has become famous with his own youtube homages, who in turn have become notorious reporters themselves. With so many faces, the famous and their fame aren’t familiar at all anymore. Fame has become the ‘un’familiar, the disposable new which hasn’t got time to stick in your head let alone grow old, throw it away after 15 minutes, 15 seconds, what’s next? what’s on the other channel? click...

Just as an aside a friend and I went ‘slow’dating recently. Not like speed dating, you get to spend a whole “15 minutes with someone to make that real connection”. This assumes that 15 minutes is now universally considered as an extended period of time. Granted, some of those 15 minutes were too long in my opinion but that’s another post... which s going to avoid sounding like the god-awful Carrie Bradshaw.

Back to the teenagers. I have a younger brother, not by much, but enough to see a difference. When he hit his millennium teen years his ‘microcosm’ and all those around him were the feverish first discovers of youtube and myspace, all communicating with each other whether they were down the round or on the other side of the globe. They were all rapidly posting up videos of themselves fooling around on the weekend for their global peer group to see, their own reality episodes that were simultaneously exploding all over my beloved MTV. A few years on and the sixteen year old LG Generation are today sitting at desks in their bedroom every night expressing their likes, dislikes, favorites and fears putting them on a sound-bite list - this is me... stay for 15 minutes and you’ll know enough. A self expression that appears to be uninterrupted and unedited with no constraints, a freedom that very few if any generations have had before from such a young age. Part of me hesitantly thinks this is an amazing thing, imagine when these kids hit adulthood with this conviction and self-expression behind them. Maybe these are really Andy’s children? Or better yet, his grandchildren- all of them will be famous together for 15 minutes while they hover over each others’ respective webpages with their cursors as the stopclock.

Question - Will cyber crash victim Miley Cyrus become the ultimate 15 minute 15 year old with a $1 billion payout?

Amongst all of this I’m for once a late bloomer ... today I have created my own blog. Who know’s if anyones watching, reading or remotely interested. But I will admit there is some comfort in just putting it out there and in the process so I cant be that behind with the times. What would Andy make of it all? Especially in a year when his beloved Polaroid, with its crashing flash and hard copy format is being wrapped up for the archives.

Whether you stay for 15 seconds or 15 minutes to simply say what the hell is she going on about?! Its just me typing out loud and rambling on... click