A few of the sites that Sindha Agha is trying to step away from. Gargoyle photo illustration by Sindha Agha (click to enlarge)

I’m always hearing about new Web sites that I dismiss immediately as wastes of time. My favorite example would be Twitter. Why do people think that everyone else wants to know what they are doing all the time? Also, why do people feel the need to record their every mundane activity? It seems obsessive and unnecessary. Act and record, act and record, act and record … soon enough you will find yourself just recording and recording, cutting out action from the formula.

Recently I’ve realized I was plagued by this obsession with documentation too. I don’t even blog (aside from the occasional blog for the Online Gargoyle) or use Twitter, but I’ve still wasted a good portion of my adolescence on Facebook and MySpace (of course now I’ve “matured” past MySpace and am pretty much exclusively a Facebook user) as well as with texting. Let’s not forget the whole photography thing.

I am, of course, naturally drawn to creating (writing, photographing, what you may), but I’ve found that Facebook has drastically changed the way I treat photography. I’ve spent the past few years photographing my friends almost all the time, or centering our socialization around photo shoots. If I ever saw something photo-worthy and was without a camera, I couldn’t enjoy it or just let myself rest in the moment, but rather I spent the whole time anxiously thinking about how I wasn’t able to document it and show it to other people.

Even after having an excellent photo shoot, the first thing I could think about was how satisfying it would be to post the pictures on Facebook so everyone else could see them too. It wasn’t about receiving useful criticism from my friends or being able to show off my photography, but it seemed that I needed other people to see what I was doing for validation.

Basically I was measuring how exciting my life was and how well I was spending my time based off how cool the documentation of it looked. I might have had a fun night, but if I didn’t have a camera at hand to cement the events into photographs, I didn’t feel satisfied that I had really done anything with my time.

This is a much more general problem than just me with my “artsy” photography. I remember during the main panel session at the Illinois State High School Press Association’s annual journalism conference there were several girls sitting around me who were constantly taking pictures of themselves with their friends. These weren’t even photographs of the events around them or the speakers, but the camera-in-outstretched-arm shot. I found it annoying. Couldn’t they just put the point-and-shoot down and listen to what the speakers were saying?

Maybe they liked their outfits that day, or just thought they were on a photogenic streak. That explains why they would have wanted to take picture of themselves during the panel, but it also proves my point. They couldn’t just go about their day enjoying their outfits or feel particularly attractive because it wouldn’t amount to anything if they didn’t get to document it.

Beyond obsessively photographing things, the idea of having a “status” (an important component to the Facebook culture and the entire concept behind the Twitter culture) suddenly seems absurd to me. Say you’re really upset about something; if you are a user of either of these Web sites, you’re bound to put some angsty lyrics as your status or some dismal statement about how much your life sucks. What is up with this need for constant expression? What is it about our generation that makes us so obsessed with statuses? Is it really the act of expression we crave, or is it the comforting feeling of reaction?

It’s depressing to think that we are constantly summarizing our lives for everyone else because, without their reactions, we don’t find our lives interesting enough. We seem to constantly be sifting through everything that happens to us and ignoring the average occurrences in favor of the more exciting ones so we can piece these together and create an image of ourselves that we can project out into the whole community of Facebook (or whatever other social networking system) users.

I think this causes people to think of themselves in a more third-person sense and begin to define other people as one would create a Facebook profile. Once you feel that people are basing their definition of you off what they see on your Facebook page or in your tweets, you can’t help but feel and act accordingly.

Aside from this analysis and criticism of a culture I very much belong to, I have no new light to shed on the plight of the technology-dependent, Internet-obsessed Generation Y. I only have a handful of complaints about how the people around me and I spend too much time documenting and not experiencing as well as learning about people through what they say about themselves on the Internet instead of getting to know them in person.

I can say I’ve put down my camera to a certain extent, and I find myself less and less interested with the characters (OK, they’re real people too, in some different realm or dimension of reality) I see on the mini-feed of my Facebook account, and I challenge you all to do the same. Real people and real experiences, I have found, are much more rewarding. I have a feeling that this has a great deal to do with the fact that they are, in fact, real.