Generation YouTube

Have you ever looked up old friends on the Internet and found nude photos of them? Now I have. Every now and then I do an Internet search for friends and acquaintances who I haven't contacted in a while, to see if I can find what they have been up to publicly or professionally. This time, I looked for a friend who I have not spoken to in a couple of years. She's in her mid-twenties, and I don't really know her that well (we may be considered more as acquaintances), both of which are relevant here.

This friend has an unusual first and last name, so when I typed her name in the search box, very few hits came up. The third and fourth hits were pretty innocuous-sounding social networking sites, but not the big ones with which everyone is familiar. So I clicked on the first one, and it is a social networking site. Her profile appeared, with a photo of herself nude. She had a bunch of other nude photos posted as well, and I'm not talking R-rated silhouetted glamour shots. The second site was more raunchy. It also followed the social networking model, but it appeared to be for people who want to hook up either personally or for professional "gigs." Some of her photos there were even more revealing, full frontal shots. I guess I found out what my friend has been up to. I was pretty surprised that she had put herself out there so publicly for her family, friends, prospective employers and the world to stumble across simply by searching for her by name.

My friend may be an older member of what I call Generation YouTube, those people, mostly in their late teens and early twenties, who are combining youthful stupidity, which has been around forever, with cheap, small video cameras (including phone cameras), which never existed before, to chronicle their lives and post the highlights on the Internet. Naturally, they want to post the most interesting parts of their lives. Naturally, that includes bad behavior, which often involves alcohol and the shedding of clothes. So now there are sites and groups such as the "30 Reasons Girls Should Call it a Night" group on Facebook, which features photos of girls who are so drunk, so throwing up, so making fools of themselves, that everyone agrees they are past the point where they Should Have Called it a Night.

I was trying to think through what this all means. In ten years, will everyone under thirty-five have nude photos and sex tapes of themselves on the Internet? As everyone posts their innermost thoughts and feelings on their MySpace and Facebook pages, will the idea of a written diary kept under lock and key to keep Mom, Dad and Little Brother away become a quaint thing of the past? By the time "Girls Gone Wild" number 157 is released, will every young woman have been filmed in a compromising position?

Will no one then care? Will we become like the French, nonchalant about our bodies and matters of sex? While now it might seem horrifying that one night of filmed drunken, semi-nude revelry can be forever available for employers and job interviewers, what happens in ten years when the next generation of job interviewers themselves have incriminating photos and videos on the Internet? If everyone does it, will the photos and videos no longer be incriminating? Will Miss America finally get to keep her crown?

When I discussed this with a friend the other night, she told me that maybe Generation YouTube won't even care about their Constitutional privacy and liberty rights that many of us are trying so hard to protect against a brutal assault by the Bush Administration. She may be correct. I can hear the thought process: So the government is listening to my phone calls? What-everr. I record all my calls and post them on YouTube anyway.

Now that thought is even more disturbing than all of us turning into the French.