Epic Magazine

In an age of electronic performance, do we allow others to define ourselves, or do we define our own selves by the company of others? Sub question: If a douchebag falls in the Louis Vuitton dressing room and there’s nobody around to Tweet it, did he actually fall at all?

One could argue that leaving any social snail trail — be it a check-in to Four Square or tweet about (ugh) sandwiches — that that might be used to document who we are and what we are about. If you’re into fashion you curate your own micro content about what you like. If you’re going through high school you blog and document your way through those four formative years. You are constantly sharing, an Editor of your own life, sharing snippets with friends and family. Status updates, Tumblr blogs, they all feed into an ongoing collective scrapbook of sorts — perhaps the first real time that any generation on this world has had a chance to contribute to the primary source of their own entry in the history books. Online, we are the Will Smith to the rest of the world’s Rest Of The Ensemble Cast Of The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air. We are all the stars of our own show, performing for any passage by. It’s like a 21st century form of busking.

But why do we do it? Why is there a constant need to share and edit ourselves into the heroes pose? Which is becoming more real to the average 11 year old brought up with no recollection of a house without one or more computers: the real world, where problems can take years to repair and social structure is rigidly defined… or the online world, where in theory all it takes is a few carefully placed key strokes to become a legend forever? We already have one of the first folk heroes of the digital era: Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, who - love him or hate him - exposed just how the American government is running the rest of the world and how incongruous it is to the narrative that the American government would have you believe. And all Mister Assange is, at the end of the day, is the editor of a website. Which - in effect - is what anyone who shares on their Facebook wall is, too.

As more and more people sign online and blog and tweet their existences one has to wonder if they all know how much power they hold: not only to write their own narratives, but that of the ongoing public narrative. While it might just be an iPhone or desktop to some, whether you use it for viewing porn or cat videos, it is still one of the most powerful things in the world: the very essence of Democracy — your very own printing press to share your views with the world. As the Wikileaks cables and cases keep unfolding, let’s not forget that we all have the same power, and that we all have a voice.

- N