Ever notice how our elders always lecture us with, “when I was your age I did X, Y and Z,” and they’re right. Our generation AKA (Generation-Y) will easily go down as the most self-absorbed generation the world has ever seen. A combination of helicopter parenting and smart phones has created the most personally invested group of human beings imaginable. Khaya Dlanga said : We live in an era that makes things look easy. Especially fame. We can blame Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton for that. We see the Fame Monster in the long lines one get sees when the Idols, Live and other such auditions open up and people who clearly know that they have no talent show up, the chance and allure to be on television is too great to resist. It is a chance to set oneself apart. But some do it because they really want to do it, because they love it – and it shows. Not everybody can be famous. If everybody is famous then nobody is famous. The social networks have of course created the illusion of fame. Once someone gets a couple of thousand of followers, they begin to think that the whole country knows who they are. Twitter especially seems like cheap and easy access to this pseudo fame. It is, to paraphrase my favourite show on TV at the moment, Game of Thrones, “Internet fame is an illusion, a shadow on the wall.” They are not as influential as they think, nor as powerful or as popular as they believe. There is the perception that appearance is everything. If I appear to be, then I am. It is not true. And now, to quote myself, “We have departed from “love thy neighbour,” that our parents taught us to “impress thy neighbour”” It is also demonstrated by people spending what they do not have in order to be respected for buying things they cannot afford. The surface becomes more important than inherent value. We have seen the display of materialism being glorified on our TVs. The more inaccessible an item is to the masses, the more value is placed on those individuals who display what they have. There was a program shown on TV recently showing kids in the townships who call themselves Izikhothane. Their hereos are Khanyi Mbau and Kenny Kunene. END In his article, Robert Lawrence stressed that unfortunately the average person’s life is not nearly interesting enough to be captured by professionals. The intuition and intelligence of our generation of course came up with a solution – capture and overshare every moment of your own life. Having a device with a camera and internet access at all times has made every person the star of their own reality show. The ability to be your own camera crew encourages a person to create the appearance of a false lifestyle that really only accurately constitutes for a few moments of their time each week. Regardless, we search for every opportunity to inflate our social standing and make ourselves look more important than we are. Sure, most of the time this activity of attention seeking isn’t directly hurting anyone. No one is being wronged directly or mistreated, but there are a ton of people being misled. It is human nature to be competitive and to fit in. The self-invested culture of our youth is spreading rapidly because people are following their peers in the way that they share and live their lives. More and more people are becoming pseudo-socialites in a world that doesn’t actually revolve around them. Just remember that while you’re tweeting about how hard it is to find a job, someone your age is out there doing a job you don’t want. When you’re blacking out at the bar on a Monday night, someone your age is making those drinks for you. When you’re sitting around pretending to be rich, someone is actually on their way there.
Posted on: Tue, 28 Jan 2014 17:29:19 +0000
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