Sci-fi of the hyperbolic present: Technicolor Ultra Mall, by Ryan Oakley

Technicolor Ultra Mall, by Ryan Oakley (EDGE Books, 2011), looks into the future and finds humanity conducting its daily affairs within the walls of city malls, the outdoors reserved for toxic air and garbage. Populations under a roof. For the lowest on the ladder, a dim and desperate basement. For the middle classes, shopping and distractions on their own bright, green level, and sometimes just distractions on the lower red level. For the highest, an unknown blue tier. Maybe they can see the sky there.

Technicolor is more William Gibson and Philip K. Dick than Isaac Asimov or Neal Stephenson, but it's not quite cyber-fiction, despite the highly connected setting, cy-fi vernacular, and video-game features. It's grim, dystopic, and all too close to reality. It doesn't romanticize a grand narrative. It is disjointed, frequently interrupted by fake advertisements and television and radio segments. It has subplots that collide in unexpected ways. It speculates on what happens when a society considers new ways to distract, amuse, pamper, and embellish oneself to be progress: better shopping, drugs, sex, television, and violence.

More than anything else, Technicolor is about violence—brutal violence—which is something I haven't come across much in my reading. I'm probably reading the wrong books. It shows its bloodied, scarred, disfigured, and senseless face right away. The characters, including the protagonists, are mainly members of a criminal gang. They're grotesque, self-serving, and proud brawlers and killers. They can also be obsequious, loyal, and wary of greed. These inner conflicts result in near constant taunts, threats, grandstanding, and frequent outbursts of intense and bloody brutality, usually by knife. It seems gratuitous, but that's the point. A central event finds a gang member volunteering to die under a guillotine, in the middle of a wake that is also a rave. The gang celebrates violence. It is creative performance; for some the only creative outlet they have.

Budgie is an adolescent gang member born and raised on the red levels of the mall. The reds are where the authorities send the undesirables in order to maintain peace on the upper levels. They are poorly policed ghettoes populated mainly by criminals, drug dealers, prostitutes, gamblers, and cheats. But the gangs profit from upper-level folk slumming it at red-level clubs on weekends, so despite frequent violence and general lawlessness, there is order.

Budgie's gang, the Vidicons, is ruthlessly expanding its territory, and Budgie has a change of heart after losing the closest thing he's ever had to a friend. Despite rising in the ranks, in the reds he sees only more dumb violence and a quick death. He devises a plan to decamp to the greens and start a new life. But he can't afford it right away. He's got to get a legitimate job, work his way up, before he can make the move permanent. In the meantime, he's got to face his comrades, who have no love for defectors.

Enter TeeVee, an alpha Vidicon hacker who scans the Info Dump, analyzing information to run criminal schemes and make dance music. (I should mention that Oakley displays a dry humour that corresponds to the setting, dark and raunchy.) TeeVee has caught wind of Budgie's plans. He wants a pair of eyes on the green levels to improve his data flow in preparation for a really big scheme. TeeVee doesn't want Budgie to spy; he wants to program Budgie so his eyes effectively become surveillance cameras, feeding information to TeeVee. Budgie accepts, without any real idea of what he's getting himself into, or any real choice in the matter. If he wants to avoid trouble with his peers, he's got to get out of the reds fast. He needs the money. Budgie also manages to woo Harmony, an independent-minded and equally disillusioned Vidicon who gives him hope for a normal life like he's only seen in old mashed-up movies.

A crooked jobs agent finds Budgie work outside the walls of the mall, maintaining the garbage sorting machines in the vast landfill surrounding. He allows his hope to grow, to reach for the horizon. Despite the drudgery of the work, the desolation of the outdoors, and the protective suit he wears against the deadly atmosphere, Budgie feels free like never before. He stares at the sky, awed and afraid. His supervisor warns him not to look at the sun.

It's fun, and it ends in disaster, but I don't want to give anything away.

I hardly need to point out the symbolism of the title, Technicolor Ultra Mall. The literal levels of the city-mall correspond to the figurative positions of their denizens. The poor and criminals live in the dim red basement levels, at the bottom of the social pyramid, where it is perpetually 2:00 a.m; where once overhead projections of stars shone, now interactive ads flickered, barely lurid enough to distract. It is out of sight, but just below the level of sanctioned activity. If they are chipped, red-dwellers are effectively prisoners in a jail city. Those without chips are just in hell, freedom within sight, but made near-impossible by social conditions. Above the reds, presumably at ground level, is "the lawn", the middle class green levels, bright and wide and tall, perfect for shopping and working, passable for entertainment. Every legal thing you want is available, but most things happen via television. Best not to think too much of the activities happening underfoot. Don't cause trouble, and you won't end up there.

Technicolor Ultra Mall is science fiction as the hyperbolic present. Its world is the delusion of a conspiracy theorist or an apocalyptician or the most extreme political commentator, a projection of the paranoid mind. Pollution may have made the outdoors unlivable, but finally, people are free from the stifling regulations of government (except harsh criminal law); commerce flows freely to its natural conclusion: the city as shopping centre. But despite the authorities' best attempts to eliminate the criminal element from polite society, racial and sectarian violence is out of control in expanding ghettoes that threaten the middle and upper classes! Look at how the de facto legalization of drugs and prostitution in the ghettoes has corrupted good citizens! Listen to the angry man on the radio! He argues like a champ and makes his guests sound crazy.

This is life inside a pulpy video game: competing gangs fight over territory, characters wear personal energy displays and carry strange weapons, they collect bonuses for tasks and reach distinct levels of achievement, and there is abundant graphic and cartoon violence.

The violence below the main floors exaggerates the violence that exists below the surface of our daily lives, directly or not—threats, pushes and shoves, looks, arguments, fights, assaults, gang violence, police violence, harassment and abuse, weapons, war, revolution—in person, on television, in the news, in sports and video games. Violence is everywhere, and we hardly notice it, we pretend not to, we acquiesce, or we participate, often without realizing it. There are people who can't ignore it, because it is integral to their life or livelihood. There are people who think some violence is acceptable, even necessary. They justify it. The rest of us pretend the world is safe: TV and video-game violence isn't real, only criminals are violent, war isn't violence, revolutions are for the unemployed, life doesn't end in violence. But it does, in fact, and Technicolor gives it to the reader in gory glory.

Beneath the violence of Technicolor are interesting, realistic, and sometimes exaggerated characters facing extreme conditions, on both the red and green levels. Communication is mediated by antisocial codes and television, but the characters manage to relate when they want to and when they try. They are still human, by turns repulsive and sympathetic, obnoxious and innocent. Without these conflicted characters, the violence they commit might be too much—too hard to take, too pointless, too blunt. Oakley makes it work and, as a result, the book is a strong first effort.

The central idea of Technicolor Ultra Mall is violence: how we can live with it, how some violence is better than other violence, how violence negates heroism. But it is full of sci-fi ideas, original and imminent. In the mall/world, shopping is the central act of citizenship; citizens, including red-levellers, undergo genetic/biological modifications (fur, wings, animal ears, etc.) as we might get tattoos; what is now on the fringe of science and society—pseudo-biological data storage, interactive TV upgraded with surveillance, transfer of mind between bodies, bio-digital computer programs, artificial intelligence, meme viruses and sicknesses, movie remixes/mash-ups, identification chips for criminals, animatronic fish, bio-digital pets, and on and on—is routine. Any one of these ideas could support a plot. Oakley presents all of them in a familiar but confusing world. Together with the well drawn characters, these ideas make the mall less blood red and more Technicolor.

My only complaint with Technicolor is the editing, which probably only bothers me as an editor. There are typos and double words that are evidently out of place, and I believe I noticed a couple of minor inconsistencies that gave me pause. Initially, I tried to rationalize the errors as a stylistic, as though the book was published in the time it takes place and language is looser. But it's clear that the book really just needs a good edit. In any case, this is the publisher's fault, not the author's, and it didn't interfere with my enjoyment of the book.

In Toronto, you can buy Technicolor Ultra Mall at Bakka Phoenix Books on Harbord, near Spadina, and no doubt other fine literary establishments.

Online, you can find it at Amazon, of course, in both print and Kindle versions. Read on..!

The internet always remembers?

Does the internet really remember everything? Do we need to teach computers how to forget?

I wonder if it won't just happen "naturally", like by attrition.

I imagine that sooner or later, irrelevant information will be pushed to the bottom of the pile (or search list) and then eventually be "forgotten", if not completely erased. Google already does this to a certain extent, arranging search results by relevance, estimated by factors like how many other sites link to the information and so on.

If a piece of information exists on a computer connected to the internet, but no website links to it, will anyone ever recover that obscure information? And what about when computers disconnect from the internet? Unless their data are cached somewhere (which, admittedly, Google and others do on a large scale), that information is no longer accessible. Also, over time, as formats and computer languages change, much more information will become inaccessible without translation.

Maybe it's just the same as with current information in "legacy" formats: there's a lot of it that exists, but which we are completely unaware of—like in dusty old tomes in libraries that we would have to spend hours or years searching for because it's not indexed. Still it's there.

I understand the ideal of going "off the grid", and avoiding trails of data that can tell others about one's daily habits or personal life. At its simplest, it means I can just go somewhere and no one will know where I am, or I can do something, and no one will know what I'm doing. Without such protection, we end up in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, never sure if someone is watching, always afraid to act.

It's not about living by the law or not. I'm sure that for many law-abiding citizens, once they believe that someone is watching their every move, they will reconsider some or many of their actions; they will become unnatural, separate from their desires, alienated from their selves.

Of course, time won't help if someone wants to remove some damning information from the internet right away. Facial recognition certainly won't make it any easier. It's almost enough to make me want to give up on Facebook. Sometimes I don't want to worry about someone seeing my photos or personal information (despite security measures).

I do believe that, in time, much digital information will be lost, in the ways I've mentioned and others. As disasters and time have destroyed copious past knowledge, so they will do to current and future knowledge. Most people probably have little to worry about when it comes to their personal information. That is, besides marketers, identity thieves, and future historians and archeologists, few people care about the average person's information. And for the time being, going off the grid can be as simple as leaving the house without your phone and wallet, and paying for things with cash.

We make much of our dependence on technology, and surely much of the talk is true. Perhaps fewer people each year could survive "in the wild"; and the idea doesn't interest them. Can we say that these people are worse off than others? Is it as dangerous as some say to trade our privacy for convenience? Is it harmful to trust technology with our secrets, some of which we would never even tell other people? Read on..!

The Interior Design Show and Come Up To My Room

I visited the Interior Design show a couple of years back when my friends at Furni Creations were exhibiting this bad boy, among other things. Danijela and I had just bought our house (we hadn't moved in yet), and we toured the exhibition with some interest. I remember enjoying the special installations and the showcase of fancy new stuff, but high-end bathrooms, kitchens, fireplaces, and all the rest were not really in our future then. That remains true today, and at this year's IDS, again the most interesting stuff was Studio North (the new design showcase), the prototypes, the student design showcase, and the installation Five Small Rooms.

It's not all great, but a lot of it is very interesting. Nothing was as thought-provoking as Radiant Dark, but IDS isn't an art or high-concept show; it's for consumers. Usually, the things I like most demonstrate attention to materials and processes that minimize the end product's environmental impact, but not always. In this case, few designers exhibited such focus. You can read about the things I found most interesting at Toronto Craft Alert.

Come Up To MY Room is the most conceptual of the TIDF events that I attended this year, and also the most remarkable. If you don't know what CUTMR is, the organizers invite artists to create installations in the second floor rooms and hallways at the Gladstone Hotel. The results are always intriguing and there are always a couple of installations that look and feel really great—in which the artists create great experiences. The artists have to work within a couple of significant limitations; for example, the rooms are small and oddly shaped, and the walls must remain white. I think the best pieces take full advantage of the room's conditions, including its shape and its lighting.

Maybe because the installations are enclosed—separate from reality—they often have the feeling of fantasy. I guess in a sense that's always the artist's intention: to create the feeling of something that's not real or hyper-real. It helps, too, that at CUTMR the viewers get to move from room to room and fantasy to fantasy, becoming more and more disoriented as the place gets busier and busier. You just need a fussy rabbit to lead you around and you'd feel perfectly lost in Wonderland. You can read my thoughts on some of the rooms on Toronto Craft Alert. Read on..!

Radiant Dark design show

I like furniture, and I like art, and I appreciate quality, durability, and design. I also appreciate cheap, but while it's possible to find all of the former qualities together, it's not possible to find the former with the last one. This is actually a major ethical quandary I face (not just with furniture): should I buy a more expensive product of higher quality when there is always a cheaper and lower-quality alternative?

Am I capable of incorporating long-term economics into purchasing decisions? Is there any point?

With all products, the issue is disposability: this is a feature of the vast majority of consumer goods today. The opposite is sustainability or durability, and it is the theme of this year's Radiant Dark design show.

See my full write-up, with pics by Danijela, at Toronto Craft Alert. Read on..!

More thoughts on laptop DJing (in response to...)

Recently I wrote a post for BlogCampaigning on my experience transitioning from a vinyl DJ to a laptop DJ, which, from personal comments, appears to have been generally well received. But the only comment anyone actually posted on the blog was quite negative and passively critical. Initially, I wanted to tell the semi-anonymous commenter where to go, but I decided to take the high road, thanking the fellow for his post and offering a very brief apologetic response.

I was wrong. I've thought about it, and I now recognize that that person's comment was uninformed and thoughtless, and I had no reason to apologize. I don't want to insult him, and I hope this response doesn't simply come off as petty. I have a far more appropriate response in mind, and it is basically a brief description of the nature of entertainment media today.

In his passive-aggressive note, the commenter appears to make three points:

1. DJs who use iTunes (or similar software) don't deserve to entertain club or bar crowds.
2. Whatever happened to DJs who can match beats by simply listening to songs (as opposed to using software to digitally and automatically beat-match)?
3. DJs today suck.

Check out the post at BlogCampaigning.com Read on..!

A new model for the music industry

In the beginning of Rock’n’Roll music there was the Guitar. It was pretty easy to learn, Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley played it, and it probably corrupted your youth. With the increasing complexity of guitar playing, particularly the Solo, came the Air Guitar. It’s an imaginary instrument—occasionally brought to life by a broom or tennis racquet—that anyone can play with the least amount of skill or coordination, and it has become so popular that somebody made a wide-release zany documentary about it. And now, in the age of entertainment, there is the Virtual Guitar, embodied in such video games as Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Gitaroo man, and Frets of Fire. Here everybody from air guitar wannabes to actual guitar players uses a miniature plastic guitar-shaped controller to play along to some classic and current rock tunes. Maybe you begin to see the possibilities already?

The appeal of these virtual guitar-playing games is very broad: you get to play (or feel like you’re playing) guitar along with some great and some awful songs (you might be surprised by what songs or bands you start to like), and without ever having to take a lesson. Inexperienced players should find that the easier levels are not at all difficult to learn and play, without being boring; it becomes challenging quite quickly for experienced players, and actual guitar-playing ability can be of little help; and at no matter what level, you get to listen to music and play a fun game at the same time—it has your undivided attention—you are taking part in creating the music. That may sound odd at first, but I think it’s entirely warranted and I’ll tell you why.

Here are some things to think about: The music industry is in a sort of crisis, unwilling to admit that the old industry model (much simplified: charging high prices for low quality, and trying to control who “owns” the product, be it a physical CD or a virtual MP3) is no longer viable. In part, mass internet usage and reality TV shows such as American Idol, Big Brother and others that promise instant fame (or at least your 15 minutes), have created widespread demand for a New Experience, not fully passive like television, but not quite physical or social. Both of these factors are exacerbated by growing competition in the entertainment arena, which has increased dramatically, particularly in recent years, with video games making up much of that competition. Also, content pirating is easy and rampant, and, worldwide, legislation on the issue is unclear. Music, which used to colour our lives, has become background music—wallpaper. It is boring, to the point that, for many people, it’s simply not worth the price. What has music done for me lately?

Enter Mediated Interactivity. All the entertainment, but with little of that awkward social-personal stuff, and all within precisely programmed, edited and strictly enforced boundaries. But that’s only a part of my point. Often we don’t realize just how broad the spectrum of entertainment media has become. And as a result, we fail to recognize that we are demanding more from those media. We are now so used to getting what we want when we want it that we find the slow pace at which the big guns in the music industry are changing very frustrating. More media—films, TV, video games, music, books (believe it or not), the internet is a big one with news, “social” networking, gambling, role-playing games, &c.—are competing for an expanding leisure market; but most of these things can only be effectively consumed independently of each other. I can’t listen to music properly while I’m watching TV or a movie. I can’t really surf the internet while playing a video game. Certainly, I can try, but I will naturally divide my attention. In some cases attempts have been made to combine entertainment media. Increasingly, for example, current bands are being featured in TV shows and movies—this is hardly new and it remains passive; and online games have become about as common as e-mail. But even when playing games that allow for some multitasking, I may be “on” the internet, but my attention must be either on the game or on some other website, not both. American Idol on the other hand, though not exactly based on a novel premise, has introduced a measure of interactivity to entertainment. You—lucky you!—get to help choose a pop star directly, without all of that silly intervening stuff like hearing about a cool new artist from an eager friend, waiting for them to come to your town, going to see the show with two other people and the bar staff, buying the shirt anyway because you love them right away, requesting their song on the radio, writing to them, and watching them develop into real talent over years. No! Too much work! Instant stars and disposable songs are what people want (of course I’m not so naïve to think that this is entirely a new development), and so far it has proven a powerful lure to capture the public’s attention: you watch the show (two hours a week, maybe more), then you make your phone calls or text messages, and then you buy (and presumably listen to) the music; though the buying variable is the more important part of that particular equation. Still, American Idol is rather more indicative of the malaise afflicting the music industry than a solution to it. All the show does is make explicit the emptiness of pop music and the root of the reasons many people are less willing to pay for it. Simply put, generic music is not worth it when you can pirate it (and better) for free, or when there is just so much of it and there are so many other things to occupy your time.

Thus Interactive Music, the early stages of which are characterized by Karaoke and Guitar Hero. Guess which one I consider more important? Karaoke on its own could never challenge the powerful music industry in North America, especially not at the time it initially became popular. Those pre-Napster years were good for Big Music. Karaoke is certainly seminal, at least with respect to what I’m talking about. But it seems to me that it was destined to be little more than a parlour game—in the West at least—in its current unchanged form. True Interactive Music, on the other hand, is characterized by the ability of the listener (a.k.a. the consumer, user, or player) to be the creator at the same time—to “make it” his or her own. In practice, you might argue, this can be said of any form of music, and certainly Karaoke: The listener can sing along, play along, rerecord and remix it, and then, in theory, release it publicly. Of course, this is the case, but none of that is sufficiently mediated.

Now, here’s the point: What I see with virtual guitar games like Guitar Hero and their Mediated Interactivity is a new model for the music industry. In this model, a band can release an album or a single song in an interactive format, playable on a video game console, a computer, or any compatible player (and of course you can copy the tunes to your iPod, too, or just play it the old-fashioned way on your stereo). The player can play along with the songs on levels from easy to difficult, and “unlock” different features as she goes: extra tracks, remixes, videos, &c.—this is the obvious stuff, initial but secondary incentives. The key for the listener is the opportunity to play the songs either as recorded, or to improvise them (or certain parts of them), and to be judged or rated on her performance. As always with the modern consumer, fun is the primary motivator and goal.

There are advantages for the bands and labels, too. This interactive model combines an entrenched medium—music—with an entertainment medium that is growing extremely quickly—video games. And there is plenty of potential to integrate other media, such as virtual social networking and chat. That is, with Interactive Music, users don’t need to choose between competing entertainments, because they have several in one. People can and will still choose to consume other forms of entertainment; but that’s not quite the issue. For labels, dominance in the market is part of the game, but nowadays perhaps a larger part is simple sustenance. Though among the media there is often conglomeration, there is rarely monopoly. In this model, there exists the possibility to further the American Idol ideal of instant stardom and disposable music. Songs can be modified, easily rerecorded and remixed, and they can easily be redistributed via the internet. They could then be voted on and downloaded for a cost or free—it doesn’t really matter; charts could be made based on player ratings and downloads, all at next-to-no cost for the labels. Most importantly, there would be a far greater incentive for consumers and fans to buy—to pay for—music: it would be interesting again.

It’s happening right now, in fact. Though not on an industry-transforming scale just yet, many of the features are basically in place. Users can buy and download new songs regularly from Microsoft’s Xbox Live service, and I hear that Sony’s Playstation 3 has some embedded features for social networking that are currently unused. But better than that, independent individuals are taking the initiative to develop the pieces of the puzzle for indie musicians and labels to take things into their own hands. There is a free, open-source Virtual Guitar game—Frets on Fire (fretsonfire.sourceforge.net)—that shows great promise for keeping indie music independent of the majors. CustomHero.net offers a service to convert regular songs into interactive songs, and ScoreHero.com provides an initial framework for scoring and judging. And with the speed at which technology and ideas are moving these days, the cross-platform spread of these games, and their broad appeal, I imagine a time in the near future when in homes across the world we will find families sitting together in front of the TV like they used to, but instead of staring dumbly at the screen, they will play and interact and give each other high fives. And all will be right with the world. Read on..!

Apple sells magic

I don't know why I never thought of it before.

Apple lovers and haters alike understand that there is a certain unmeasurable “cool factor” to Apple products that is the main reason why people buy them over other similar (and perhaps better) products. I think it's clear that this cool factor has a lot to do with Apple's Advanced Marketing Techniques. (There are other disputed factors, of course. Among them quality, design, vision, and market savvy.) The people at Apple (along with their marketing team) know how to make the most of products that may not be revolutionary, but which certainly appear that way to the average person. That's the magic. (And so you know, I'm using “magic” in a value-neutral sense here.)

Celebrated science fiction author and physicist Arthur C. Clarke wrote that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I'm not sure if he has considered the effect of marketing on this so-called “law”. I think Apple has, if only tacitly. You see, Apple does not develop exceptionally advanced technologies. They are, however, quite good at using current advances, and putting them in fancy packages. The thing is, most existing pre- or near-market technology is far beyond what the average person understands. (Despite constantly increasing usage of technology, I'm certain that most people actually have little understanding of how their gadgets work.) And when that fact is combined with a futuristic design, the result can be startling to the lay person. Basically, with their marketing Apple takes advantage of the knowledge gap between us and their products, which makes them seem more advanced than they actually are. It appears that a sufficiently advanced marketing strategy can make a moderately advanced technology seem like magic.

I have no idea why it took the MacBook Air (MBA) for me to recognize this. I guess it's because unlike recent Apple products like the iPhone and Apple TV, the MBA stands out for what it doesn't have rather than what it does. That is, with the iPhone, Apple combined several still burgeoning technologies (Wi-Fi, portable web-surfing and video, touch screen), with the lifestyle standards of the day (digital music playback and mobile telephony), and added their unique software and design flair, thus creating the new must-have cross-generational lifestyle device—nearly superseding their own iPod (they even redesigned the latter product to match it). All of these technologies exist separately, but Apple put them together and created what appeared to be an highly advanced device that has no peer in the North American and European markets. The MBA on the other hand is a product that already exists—a laptop—and it's functionally inferior to other laptops on the market. Still—and this is crucial—it speaks to the future of the laptop and of personal computing generally. Apple has tried a similar formula as they did with the iPhone: they've taken several upcoming technologies (solid-state “flash” hard disk memory, wireless data transmission*, “multi-touch gestures”, embedded video recording), but then they've actually removed certain standard features in the hope of appearing more advanced and cornering a new lifestyle standard—ultra-portability (the computer has no CD or DVD drive and only the barest minimum of ports). But they've made it seem shockingly thin, and this, Apple is betting, is the main feature that will make this laptop appear sufficiently advanced for us simple people to see it as magic. And importantly, they've done it before anybody else. (Other companies have developed ultra-portable devices, but had you heard of any of them before the MacBook Air? Maybe you geeks had, but I bet the average consumer had not.)

I see through you now Apple! Not that I believed that the fanaticism around Apple wasn't half marketing, but now I understand better what constitutes that “cool factor”: simple magic!

Very clever. But will it work?

*Of course, we have been able to transmit data wirelessly for decades (not including by voice!), but you all understand that I'm talking about current mainstream computer technology. Read on..!

Duelling identities, part 1

I'm not sure how much stock we should put in an article that claims “Youngsters not happy oldies going online”, from an Australian News Corp. affiliate, which I must assume is a tabloid, given this photo of Britney Spears on their front page (I recommend you don't follow the link). The piece cites no sources or even unscientific polls, though the author seems to have interviewed several “youngsters” and a “youth market researcher” from California. Is there in fact a trend—a spreading ageism or gerontophobia among the youth? Or is this article meant to reinforce the contemporary stereotype of lost kids in the digital age and to promote an “us vs them” attitude?

In any case, while the article may be a tabloid fluff piece, it does bring up some interesting talking points. In particular the Generation Gap, which for a while seemed to be growing wider as it coincided with the Technological Divide; Divergent Identities; privacy; the extension of adolescence; and the arrogance of youth.

According to the article, young persons - presumably those of university undergrad age and younger—are often displeased when their elders, particularly their parents and their parents’ friends, find and befriend them on social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace. Being online friends with these “oldies” causes alarm among young folk because it prevents them from communicating openly with their peers for fear of having their adolescent antics exposed.

Though it shows no clear bias—that is, it makes no explicit argument—the article is mostly rubbish. But I do find the idea of Secondary Identities very interesting. Underlying the emptiness of it all, the author (perhaps without knowing) points out that many people (certainly the young are not alone in this) do or say things online that they would not do or say in “real life”, and definitely not around their parents or other adult members of society. People post pictures of themselves and their friends doing things they would not do or discuss in polite company; they post inflammatory comments on web forums that they would be too frightened to say to someone’s face; they offer personal details that they might think twice about before mentioning aloud; all voluntarily, and apparently mostly without regret or fear of repercussion. In the process, regular internet users are creating secondary identities, without even realizing it. And these alternative identities don't seem to match our daily lives.

One might consider it positive that people are expressing themselves honestly through their online identities. That's fair; but why are we unable to reconcile our real and virtual lives? And is it really honest to say something in one place that we would not say elsewhere (particularly when that “one place” is the world wide web)? I don't think it's simply a question of public and private, though that certainly plays a part. Generally, my real public acts are the ones that I want to show others, or rather, they are the things I don't mind others discovering. These acts demonstrate the person that I want others to believe I am. Real private acts are the ones that perhaps more accurately represent my true or hidden character, such as binge drinking, drug taking, excess gambling, vandalism, passive aggression. Indeed, there is a grey area that includes those daily acts that I have no interest in making public, but which should cause little embarrassment if they did become generally known. These might be certain “small-v” vices (smoking tobacco, listening to Yanni, et c.), bedroom activities, or shopping habits. These are truly public acts, because I make no effort to hide them from anybody. The behaviour of my virtual personae should more or less line up with the real. The difference is that it is so much more difficult to keep things private on the internet. Public and private behaviour converge here.

Much has been made in the last couple of years of prospective or current employers discovering their candidates or employees engaged in undesirable behaviour (perhaps even while at work). And several schools have expelled students for inappropriate behaviour discovered on the web. The media tell us: “Your stellar résumé won't save you if there’s a video on YouTube of you throwing up on a stripper, even if it was your bachelor party.” (Unless you're a celebrity.) Actually, in the technological age, where many pray at the altar of celebrity, we seem to revel in playing a part and acting as both celebrities and paparazzi within our own private cliques. On the internet, we can be the stars of our own lives, emulating our favourites and showing off the pictures to prove it.

Stay tuned for part 2. Read on..!