My thoughts

I've spent a lot of brain juice in the last few months thinking about the phenomenon of celebrity, and about the effect the shrinking of the world has had on our perception of it. The Internet and reality television have put celebrity, or at least widespread recognition, celebrity's uncouth cousin, within seemingly easy reach of anyone with a computer or a telegenic personality, and at the same time the modern 24-hour media has torn more traditional celebrities from their pedestals and exposed them as human beings like us.

I'm not entirely done wrapping my mind around the relationship between these things, but the general shape of my feeling is that my generation has developed a social ethos that simultaneously venerates celebrity and sees it as easily achievable. We have hundreds of Facebook friends, and we use technologies like blogs and Twitter to turn our lives into media for the consumption of others.

None of this is necessarily a bad thing, but I find myself often asking whether the constant invitation of others into one's private sphere doesn't have an inevitable impact on one's authenticity. I've caught myself in the midst of an experience enjoying not the experience itself but the anticipation of the blog post that I could create from it. The publication of our lives on webpages and in social media separates us from ourselves; we are no longer living, but rather crafting personas and managing brands. How can we be authentic when we're living for the consumption of others?

With these thoughts moving through my mind so much recently, I've been forced to keep questioning my motives for posting something here. Do I really have something interesting to say? Or am I just turning my life into media for the sake of my ego? If I'm not adding value to the Internet by publishing actual content rather than 'what I ate today' fluff, I think it's better to just let the American Umlaut sit empty.

This is a complicated line of thought that I obviously haven't quite gotten my brain all the way around. It's hard to know how one should shape one's relationship with the Internet and social media. It's especially complicated for me because of the international nature of so many of my most important relationships, which provide a pretty good argument in favor of turning more of my life into media for the sake of keeping in contact.

As always, I'd be thrilled to learn your thoughts on my thoughts. Assuming I have interesting things to add to the conversation that is the Internet, I'll hopefully be posting a bit more often here - otherwise I generally say hi at least once or twice a day on Facebook, where you're more than welcome to drop by.