i love me

*This is my final paper for my English 1 class. I'll be passing this today. After nearly five months, I wrote this essay in just a little over an hour. Hahaha. Enjoy.

Upon waking up, the very first thing I do in the morning is to fire up my computer. I spend the first hour of my day checking my email, reading new blogs, viewing new albums, and looking at updated web pages. Friendster, Facebook, Multiply, YouTube, Yahoo, and Google are my breakfast buddies - I actually eat my corned beef and eggs at the computer table, usually while writing a blog post of my own or uploading some of my pictures.

The weird part is that it's the same every day. Sure, the titles change, but the content stays roughly the same: I love me.

It's no longer unusual to see albums on Multiply filled to the brim with pictures of just one face. It's no longer out of the ordinary to read a blog post in Blogspot or LiveJournal about one's deepest thoughts. It's no longer surprising to learn everything about someone from his or her Friendster profile. It IS unusual not to find someone and their story online.

New media and communications technologies have had the effect of connecting everyone on the planet – well, at least those who have access to such technologies. The personal computer, the Internet, cellular phones, digital cameras: all have done much to bring people from near and far away together. Consequently though, they have also had another effect on the youth of today.

Easy access to the Internet in the age of Wi-Fi and DSL Broadband connections plus the proliferation of more affordable digital cameras and cell phones and not a little bit of peer pressure has caused the current generation to put most –if not all- of their lives "out there" where everyone can see.

It's very different from the past. I was watching the movie The Patriot on HBO the other day, and the opening scene showed a post rider delivering letters to the home of the main character. Everyone was excited to see the mail and read the news back then in 1776. In 2008, it has all become a matter of routine. Back then, at least until the invention of the Internet, only the famous or the prominent or the controversial made the news. Today, everyone is in the news – so much so that Time Magazine's Person of the Year for 2006 was "You".

A very shocking assertion, right? Wrong. While nearly 99% of the people on this planet do not get featured on CNN, the Internet has given all of us access to everyone else. We can publish our stories, our pictures, indeed our lives on the myriad of web sites which allow us to do so. It's really quite simple. Blogspot, for instance, allows one to sign up and put up their own blog site in three easy steps: create an account, name your blog, choose a template. You get a place to publish your thoughts and your ideas for everyone to see in three steps. That simple. Signing up for every other web site out there and creating your own little niche in the online world is also just as easy.

It's all so easy in fact that we all feel entitled to share everything with everyone, maybe because we all want to be noticed. We all want to be seen. We all want to be heard. As Cito Beltran explained in his article Now Showing: Me for PCIJ.org, cyberspace has become "a surefire way to stardom" limited only by the imagination.

Does a sense of self-importance prevail among the youth of today – our generation?

Go online and see for yourself.