MANOVICH'S ESSAY

"It is only a matter of time before constant broadcasting of one’s life becomes as common as email." The rise of reality television has been well documented, but on a much larger scale people appear to be broadcasting (at least certain aspects of) their lives via internet sites like Facebook and Youtube. Perhaps the moment I first consciously thought about this idea was when I noticed that people were writing things which would previously have been said in person or in an e-mail on each other's Myspace profiles (in the section which was designated for testimonials on its predecessor Friendster). This phenomenon is even more marked on Facebook, to the extent that to send someone a private message implies quite a high level of intimacy - it's almost odd not to be seen to be displaying your social arrangements. Facebook is also interesting because a certain amount of control over how much of your life is actually broadcast has been taken away. Unless you specify otherwise, other people can tag you in photos without your permission. The constant advance of technology like cheap digital cameras fuels all this, as well as the likes of Flickr and Youtube. People take photos and videos of parts of their lives, and it seems almost inevitable that they will want to show them off to a much wider audience than was possible with, say, a slide show for the neighbours in the past, if they can.

My personal experiences definitely support the statistics about media use. In around 2001 I kept a (very embarrassing) online journal. It was public because the idea of anyone I knew in 'real life' stumbling upon it seemed unlikely. Today I expect the likelihood of it being discovered would have increased dramatically. Also, recently I received a Flickr message from a girl who had googled my previous address because she was now planning to rent the house. She had found a picture I'd taken of the house and tagged and decided to ask me about how I'd found living there, and we realised we had mutual friends. These examples seem to go along with the idea of the internet moving from being about publishing to being about communication.