Look at Me! True Confessions, Naughty Pictures, and Letting it All Hang Out

I recently read a book called Mortified: Real Words. Real People. Real Pathetic. by David Nadelberg. It's a collection of embarrassing childhood diary entries, love letters, pictures drawn, and dirty stories written by twelve year-olds and adolescents with only a notional idea about sex. Anybody that reads these and remembers anything about stories they penned as a kid will be instantly pricked with a sense of mortification as a long-forgotten, unwelcome memory comes flooding back to remind them of how ridiculous they actually were sometimes.

I recall a time when I was three or four years-old and I went through a phase where I kept drawing "anatomically correct" bunny rabbits. I can't imagine what my preschool teacher must have thought. I don't know what made me fixate on this subject for my pictures, but likely it was something rather mundane. At that time, my mom had bought me a book about the human body written for younger children. It was illustrated in bright colors and had a few pages dedicated to human reproduction. Of course the book was written for a younger child--not enough detail to tell you how IT really happens, but enough to let you know that you weren't brought by the stork. IT still had that aura of mystery. Looking back, it all seems so Freudian. How weirdly ironic that as a four-year old I connected the most basic human act with an animal known primarily for its prolific reproduction and in bygone years, a pregnancy test.

When I was in high school, I discovered that my mom had saved these masterpieces, I was horrified. I begged her to throw them out. I was certain I would have died of embarrassment if anybody had ever seen them. Never in a million years would I have posted them where people could see them. That's the way diaries and secrets used to be and there used to be a term for pictures of people in compromising positions: blackmail photos.

So why do people these days feel compelled to post their deepest secrets and humiliating pictures on the web for the world to see? It's coming back to bite them in the butt. A young woman who graduated from teacher's college was denied her teaching certificate by the state when they discovered compromising pictures on her blog. She's not the only one. Employers commonly look for potential employees' blogs and websites and they're not hiring people who post pictures of themselves in their most risque moments.

It's not just blogs either. We live in a voyeuristic society. Look at the glut of reality shows. In spite of their different formats they all have one common denominator--LOOK AT ME!

In spite of the fact that we have more information at our fingertips and more ways to connect with the world around us than ever before, we're more cut off from each other than at any other time in human history. I walked into Panera Bread one day and witnessed three or four people sitting at a table together. They were all working on their own laptops completely disengaged from each other. Together, but still alone.

Not only has cable TV, video games, and the internet contributed to a society of sedentary couch potatoes, they've made the world a lonely place. We now have a generation of people who have no idea how to connect and desperately want to. People want to be known and the only way they think they can make that happen is through message boards, forums, and blogs. That's hardly a suitable substitute for real relationships. Now we have a world of people screaming LOOK AT ME!