Look at me! How dare you look at me!?

I'm going to participate in a panel for the Computers and Writing conference held at UGA at the end of May. I will be talking about RCLGA but I was just browsing through some of the other papers people are giving at this conference, and I came across a panel titled "Look at Me! How Dare You Look at Me!: Identity, Representation and the Digital Communicative Act." I thought this was a hilarious title that describes so accurately what we see happening with blogs and social networking websites these days. Here is a quote from Morgan Gresham's proposal for this panel:

"Our voyeur culture totally feeds into our need to tell everyone/anyone about ourselves – only to become upset when our privacy is invaded. If people are now destined to share *everything*, then some of us are now destined to control, to hide, to deny everything. Fear of self-disclosure is problematic as it is audience awareness to the extreme. Identity is something we piece together and we perform; identity is composed. That is why it is hard to create an online space. 1) We don't know who we want to be, and 2) We don't know who will be seeing the identity that is created in a particular space."

This is something I really started to think about when I was a high school teacher. One of my students posted on his blog very violent details about how he wanted to kill me. I'm sure it never crossed his mind that I might read what he had written when I "googled" my own name. But he obviously wanted someone to read it, just not me. The problem with the internet is that, even though some sites have privacy settings and controls, we really never know who is reading our stuff. So, like the above quote identifies, we have no idea who our audience is. And so much of what we actually say in life is determined by our audience. I'm not going to go into the philosophical or psychological implications of identity that follow from that. But the truth is, I have no idea who is really even reading this post right now! It seems like so many people want to show of their lives on the internet but then get really offended when people actually look to see what they've posted. I'm not saying it's wrong to have these conflicting feelings...it's just kind of bizarre, don't you think?

Just something to ponder...