In her bedroom in Lubbock, Tex., Ms. Adams, 21, tried out a variety of poses — coy, friendly, sultry, goofy — in the kind of performance young people have engaged in privately for generations before a mirror. But Ms. Adams's mirror was a Web cam, and her journey of self-expression, documented in five digital self-portraits, was soon visible to the 56 million registered users of MySpace.
Coincidentally Josh sent me a link this morning to a short film called MySpace: The Movie, about the embarrassing but universal habits of the typical MySpacer (including the taking of self-portraits), and the pitfalls that come with Internet life. (Check it out -- it's hilarious because it's true.)I'm sure a more intelligent person could read more into this, this commenting on a medium via the medium itself, this new sense of controllable self (take enough self-portraits and anyone can be hot -- it's "the angles"!), this whatever. Me, I'm just happy we've got something, that my generation has something of our own. I watch Lords of Dogtown and regret that skateboarding has already been done. I read Men of Tomorrow and regret that the comic book has already been invented. I'm sad that I'll never be a hippie. But I think in 30 years kids will look back in awe at the early 2000s, at the rise of MySpace and all the little webcam movies you can find on YouTube and Google Video, the -- I'm speaking on a stage now, in a good suit; the sun is shining -- the rise of the time when anyone with a broadband connection can be a media mogul, when teens and college students and twentysomethings are staking out their own territory no different from the pioneers of the Old West! That's something. And there will be plenty of photos to document this. Ninety percent of them will have arms in them.
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