Too Much Information: I Got Out Just In Time

Much as I love the Internet, I can't help but look back at High School Lauren and think, wow--she got out just in time.  The reason I think this is because I know I would have been addicted to MySpace and Facebook, which fortunately didn't become a reality for me until I was in college and my senses of discipline and ambition had already disappeared.

As it was, I was pretty obsessed with Web 1.0's meager offerings of AOL IM, member profiles, and community pages in the late '90s.  Once colors were finally allowed, I remember turning my AOL profile--already overrun with shout outs to my basketball peeps and quotes from Drop Dead Gorgeous--into a fuschia-on-black atrocity that also included some bonus touches like GO ROCKETS written in alternating school colors. 

Basically, whatever features were available, I abused.  I can only imagine what things would have escalated to if AOL had let me add songs, images, animations, or any of the other elements that allow the current crop of teens to turn their AIM and MySpace profiles into aesthetic creations more overwhelming than Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium.

The seeds of addiction were definitely there, just waiting to take root.  I distinctly remember how "being on AIM all the time" was at the top of my short list of reasons for getting excited about college.  I lamented the fact that AOL profile character limits kept me from including what I felt was an adequate number of quotes (i.e., "Lame--I guess if I want to include that funny thing I said in Spanish Class today, I have to remove this Field Hockey inside joke to free up the space").  Even when I had no reasons left to be online, when all of my friends had signed off and all my e-mail had been checked, I busied myself with tasks like downloading AOL's "Welcome," "Goobye," and "You've Got Mail" notifications in Hugh Grant's voice.  Seriously.

It seems to me that in their respective climbs to ubiquity, Facebook and MySpace have made micro-generations.  Consider the children in my family, all born in the '80s, and all having been introduced to social networking at different points in our life.  The small differences in our ages seem much larger when mapped against the number of Facebook friends we each have:

My older sister Kelly doesn't even have a Facebook profile, but my younger sister and I picked them up in college and have moderate numbers of friends to show for it.  Still, both of us can also think of people we know that don't have Facebook accounts.  My brother, on the other hand, has 600-something friends.  This is a drastic increase that can't just be explained by him being more popular than us.  There's something else there--namely, that everyone within a four-year radius of his age has a Facebook profile, and just about everyone he meets is "friend" material.  His micro-generation has never known it to be any other way.

Check on your own siblings--I'm willing to wager that 95% of you will see similar trends.  Which brings me to wondering about future generations.  By the time I have kids in high school, who knows what they will be able to put online.  You can bet it will make our current offerings of 'Favorite Movies' and 'Hometown,' (things that already make experts worry about privacy issues) look downright provincial.  I'm picturing real-time updates on their major organ systems, or views from a webcam permanently affixed to their little heads.  But actually, I'm sure whatever they come up with will be much, much worse.

Lauren McMahon (e-mail, website) writes "Too Much Information" on Tuesdays at 2:00.  Find out more here.

Comments

[justin]

me and 624 other people disagree with you and think that your brother is totally sweet.

[EmGusk]

this lady did this study about who uses facebook vs. myspace: http://www.physorg.com/news114712303.html. it's really interesting. apparently she was at the forefront of researching people on the internet in like 1993. i feel like we would be excellent case studies for her.

[Tori]

What was the name of that weak networking site we were really into in high school? Sixdegrees or something?

[Mom]

You forgot to mention that I put daily time limits on the AOL usage-hopefully this would have kept you from overloading in high school.