Do today's blogging teenagers have no sense of shame?

Do today's blogging teenagers have no sense of shame?
By Anne Karpf (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-03-13 07:09

When my children come home from school, their preferred form of chilling out is logging on. While the younger one contents herself with designing a cyber-home on The Sims simulation game (in spooky imitation of what her mother is doing in the embodied world), the older one makes straight for MySpace. There she chronicles her life and times.

I can't be sure because I haven't looked (unless you count the time she left it open on her father's computer), not only because I know I'd find it disturbing, but also because she'd hate me to.

Here's the paradox: She and her friends are happy to parade the intimacies of their lives to everyone except those who, on a day-to-day basis at least, live closest to them and have known them longest.

Of course it's not really paradoxical: They're communicating with their peers and creating their adolescent persona, and don't want us around watching. In fact, they're doing exactly what we did at their age, even if we did it through physical space the telephone and the diary.

Blog self-exposure

But what's shocking to us is the extent of self-exposure they embrace. These kids live their lives online, but to their parents it feels like public nudity.

A survey of 1,019 teenagers reported last week that only one in 10 of them wrote a diary compared with the 47 percent of them who blog.

Could there have been, in the seven or eight years since the arrival of the blog and online diary, a cultural shift of such a size that the privacy of the bound diary is now regarded as some quaint, pre-digital relic, as derisory to young people as some Victorian ideas about modesty now appear to us?

It's easy to come over all nostalgic for the Dear-Diary era. Searching for one I kept during a particularly intense six months in my teens the one that logged every single kiss and fondle, the one my kids are dying to get their hands on, which luckily is still hiding in one of the boxes unopened since my house move I found another, written in the year my first child was born, noting every burp (hers) and cry (mine).

Diary generation

From kissing to burping: I've written diaries, it seems, only in times of overwhelming emotions, where writing offers the prospect of taming feeling.

Is it any different today? I just read a poignant posting on MyDearDiary.com from someone about to go to court to testify to try to stop her mother going to prison: "It's nice to be able to come on here and vent about everything."

Yes, many blogs are horribly banal, but the idea that diaries were private and permanent, and blogs are public and ephemeral we're all exhibitionists now seems a little too easy.

Alan Bennett says that diaries are a conversation with yourself but he published his, and even Anne Frank revised hers for publication. Many young bloggers archive their blogs.

This gives them not only the fixity of the page but also all that future pleasure of laughing at their younger self, realizing that everything they once felt certain about they now doubt, and everything they had doubts about now belongs in the realm of certainty.

The diary gives you evidence against yourself; perhaps the blog will too.

Sneer and fear

Those of us from the generation of the book inevitably sneer at and fear MySpace, where teenagers think nothing of recording their late period alongside their favorite band.

An article in the New York Times last month argued that young people today not only have a much less developed sense of shame than their parents but they also live their lives in front of a kind of invisible audience.

As, they reason, ours is already a surveillance society, why not seize control and display ourselves?

I can't pretend I understand, but then that's probably a good thing. Parents need to be on standby through the crucible of adolescence, ready with a fire extinguisher to douse any leaping flames, but at a safe distance.

Our kids are separating, and developing a sexual identity. They do have a sense of privacy it's just not a public/private one, but an old/young one. Their blogs, like our diaries, are out of bounds. They can't read mine, and I won't read theirs.

The Guardian

(China Daily 03/13/2007 page10)

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2007-03/13/content_826159.htm

Posted by Summer