I Am User Generated

As a small child I remember being in church and the pastor explaining if you were truly pure then you could walk around with loudspeakers hooked up to your thoughts. Even then this notion scared me. There was no way that I could handle having my thoughts broadcast 24/7.

Well here we are in a Web 2.0 world where blogs and social networks are growing exponentially. More and more tools are being developed to help us broadcast our personal life. Is this making us more pure?

Workers are being hired and fired based on their Myspace pages. Lying about a sick day is a lot harder with GPS cell phone tracking. Cheating on your lover is a dangerous tight-rope walk with friends of friends being a lot closer to each other. Flickr allows anyone to broadcast their photos and if you happen to be in a Tahiti shot when you said you were on business in Toronto then you’re in big trouble.

With more of our personal life being more and more traceable we are forced to be just that much more transparent. Corporations are learning the hard way that they have to be totally forth coming because the access to information is just that much more pervasive.

There has been plenty written on self-representation on social networks, but as we feed more and more content into social networks and our friends add comments, photos, videos about our lives we begin to lose our agency to falsely represent ourselves and are forced to live a pure, honest and transparent online existence.