“Ask me anything.” How many times in your life have you said these words? And under what circumstances? I’m picturing two people in a quiet room, the aphrodisiacal haze of trust and latent disclosure wreathing their heads like smoke from a post-coital cigarette. It’s an intimate statement, right?
Or it was until social media platform FORMSPRING.ME co-opted it as its tagline. A site for compulsive disclosers, a site for anyone who has ever felt like their online persona is barking into the void, Formspring.me puts you at the centre of a press conference while a scrum of anonymous askers plies you with unfiltered, unbridled questions about everything from “the most courageous thing you’ve ever done” to your feelings on video games or pet euthanasia. (First you have to tell everyone you know that you have a Formspring account – the easiest way by Facebook and/or Twitter. When they visit it, they will find an empty box into which they can type anything, anonymously.)
Does it feel good? Oh, you bet it does. As Gawker recently put it, Formspring is the “crack cocaine of oversharing.” For a few shining hours, you feel like the belle of the ball. A masquerade ball, where the concealed identities of your questioners make everything seem slightly risky and flirty, and therefore exciting.
Unlike YouTube commenters, a mosh pit of attention-hungry vulgarians whose mutual anonymity provokes cruel idiocy, the questioners on Formspring are most likely known to you, and so threaten to destabilize your social comfort with one diabolically worded question. You’re walking a razor’s edge: One moment it’s all flattery (someone is asking me to talk about my dreams!) and the next, it’s “show us your ta-tas.” The element of danger is perversely thrilling.
It’s a high that cuts across cultures: One day last week, a real-time Google search for Formspring.me turned up a poignant stream of pleas from around the globe. “Ask me anything!” rose the cry from the Philippines, Singapore, Brazil. But as Gawker points out, it’s a fast high; the very next day, the words “I forgot about Formspring” drifted up from the much slower live feed.
Of course, a successful Formspring experience depends on an interested public... and you'd start an account with the assumption that you are an interesting person.
My thoughts on the rise and popularity of the website remind me of what novelist Tom Wolfe put his finger on what was then a nascent trend, a new preoccupation with self-awareness, way back in the seventies, which he called the “Me Decade.”
And now? Well, we are in the Me-Me-Me Decade.
The retreat from the collective to a celebration of the individual is not all bad, of course, not when you consider the joy of self-selected entertainment and convenient product modification. Who doesn’t like a self-edited world? Those Apple folk fully understood the giddy rise of solipsism by putting our favourite pronoun – i – as the prefix on every product, smack dab at the centre of our world as a consumer.
But the savvy attention to the needs of Me – we hired life coaches and professional shoppers, expected personal trainers to transform our bodies – has somehow led the individual to make an annoying assumption: The world is paying him specialized attention, ergo, the world wants to know what he’s doing now, how he feels, and whether his kid barfed up his breakfast. We seem to have an uncontrollable urge to emote, to share, to treat life as an Oprah-esque talk show.
It’s as if humanity – the Western part of it, anyway – is in a collective teenage moment. We are anxious to individuate, a tendency manifested in our obsession with social media, our relentless blogging about nothing. We want to be heard and seen. There seems to be a need for an online presence.
Yet we also make it easy for everyone to be the same. Everyone can have style, courtesy of mall-store versions of brand-name designers. Every home can have a bit of Martha. Everyone has access to the same information. Everyone sips from the same cup. It’s only natural that people would want to make clear how they are different and use their individual experience as a tiny protest against the mass embrace of values and products.
Well, maybe as we dive into 2010, we’re experiencing the crest of the Me wave. We can only hope. To put it in perspective, let me remind Net Gen types out there that while they may think that all their tech wizardry is revolutionizing the world (which, granted, it is), they are simply continuing a trend begun by that most annoyingly self-reverential generation, the Boomers. So, come on, think up something completely new, will ya?
I could be wrong, of course. You may love how the world has evolved. This tirade could just be about me.
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