We Want Media

Emily Nussbaum's Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy: The Greatest Generation Gap Since Rock and Roll introduces us to a shocking trend. Namely, did you know people use the Internet for self-promotion? Photo sharing? Even porn!

Well, of course a majority of us do and that's the basis for her piece. Kids, and that's a very loose term considering one of her subjects is a 26-year old bartender, are learning how to assemble a new sense of culture through sites like Vimeo , Facebook and the 800 pound Gorilla we call YouTube

But the winning selection comes from NYU professor Clay Shirky:

[He] describes this generational shift in terms of pidgin versus Creole. “Do you know that distinction? Pidgin is what gets spoken when people patch things together from different languages, so it serves well enough to communicate. But Creole is what the children speak, the children of pidgin speakers. They impose rules and structure, which makes the Creole language completely coherent and expressive, on par with any language. What we are witnessing is the Creolization of media.”

What does this mean for us? Well, on one hand, it brings up the façade of "knowing" a person, as Nussbaum reads through one subject's old livejournal posts after meeting her. But it also cheapens contact, such as how Nussbaum does not physically meet Caitlin Oppenheimer once, but relates to iChat interviews and watching her videos. Oh, and according to the king/queens of snark over at Gawker, it also means rehashing trend pieces.

edit: and yes, I did mistake ny mag as a monthly. I'm guilty of the blogger "fly by the pants" stereotype.