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| Tales of the Parodyverse >> View Post |
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Subj: Except that many members of the target age group I'm talking about disagree with your disagreement. :) Posted: Wed Jul 23, 2008 at 11:27:40 pm EDT (Viewed 477 times) | Reply Subj: I disagree... Posted: Wed Jul 23, 2008 at 10:12:55 pm EDT | ||||||
One of the many things I've learned, from visiting my mom's classrooms for so many years, is that kids see the Internet in a completely different way than we do, and use it accordingly. They are VERY open (arguably TOO open) about posting all of their most intimate life's details online, and the pragmatic relative degrees of anonymity that you and I might know enough to engage in are something that they constantly have to be reminded to practice, even in an age of well-publicized cases of sexual predators taking advantage of kids through the Internet, because those same kids often see it, not merely as an option, but almost as an entitlement, to become "Internet famous." They've been raised in an all-encompassing media culture in which fame is seen as an end goal, in and of itself, and through the Internet and reality TV both, they've also seen that one of the more effective ways of gaining that fame is by exposing themselves - either figuratively, literally or both - online. When my mom has let me answer her students' questions about superheroes (they know me as "Mrs. Boxleitner's son, who scammed a ton of free comics for his ship after 9/11, and who always donates his used comics to our class"), two things I've been asked, with increasing frequency, are a) how superheroes can manage to keep their identities secret, in this age of all-pervasive seeing-eye media, and b) why they would even choose to do so. Indeed, I posted this same essay on my LiveJournal, and I've already received the following reply to it, from Avalon's Willow, who's a 20something superhero comics fan: In a world with Flickr are people really not going to guess how Peter Parker gets those crazy angles? Especially with other people hanging out of windows to take cellphone and digital shots of Spidey's fights? I would contend that even kids who want to believe that "a man can fly" are, increasingly, inherently incapable of believing in secret identities. | |||||||
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