Internet o el fin de la vida privada

Recomiendo mucho un artículo de Emily Nussbaum, del New York Magazine, titulado Say Everything («As younger people reveal their private lives on the Internet, the older generation looks on with alarm and misapprehension not seen since the early days of rock and roll. The future belongs to the uninhibited»).

Es un reportaje sobre, bueno, nosotros: menores de 30, exponiendo por doquier nuestros pensamientos, escritos, gustos, amigos, familias, parejas, compartiendo nuestras fotos y vídeos, archivando para la eternidad online todo sobre nuestras vidas.

(Un pensamiento perturbador: googelizarse a uno mismo dentro de 20 o 30 años. ¿A quién encontraremos?)

«Say everything» es la disección desprejuicidada de los cambios sociales producidos por la pérdida de la privacidad en un mundo donde, en realidad, ya nada es privado. Un mundo muy diferente a ése donde se crió esa otra generación, la que también usa Internet pero -cómo decirlo- no la capta (a algunos les convendría entender lo que Nussbaum llama el cambio 3: «Their skin is thicker than yours»).

El artículo llama a Internet «la brecha generacional más grande desde el rock and roll». Un par de extractos:

And as it did in the fifties, the older generation has responded with a disgusted, dismissive squawk. It goes something like this:

Kids today. They have no sense of shame. They have no sense of privacy. They are show-offs, fame whores, pornographic little loons who post their diaries, their phone numbers, their stupid poetry—for God’s sake, their dirty photos!—online. They have virtual friends instead of real ones. They talk in illiterate instant messages. They are interested only in attention—and yet they have zero attention span, flitting like hummingbirds from one virtual stage to another.(…)

For anyone over 30, this may be pretty hard to take. Perhaps you smell brimstone in the air, the sense of a devil’s bargain: Is this what happens when we are all, eternally, onstage? It’s not as if those fifties squares griping about Elvis were wrong, after all. As Clay Shirky points out, “All that stuff the elders said about rock and roll? They pretty much nailed it: Miscegenation, teenagers running wild, the end of marriage!”

Vamos, léanlo completo.