Oversharing In The Future

Tapping off a few Twitter posts on you keyboard everyday about your new haircut or that test you nearly flunked doesn’t seem like a big deal. Neither does posting an album of photos taken at your debut. In this cyber age with all the infinite possibilities, it’s pretty much a normalcy, ever since the Internet became a major player in human social interaction. The average human being of the present has developed two separate psyches that he makes use of in day to day life. One is the real, physical identity he embodies to trek this huge glob of soil, metal and liquid called “Earth”, while the other is virtual - it can be hotchick17 on Yahoo, or “Bry Dizon” on Facebook. And because the Net has become a sphere very similar to the physical one, there is now very little in its way to slow it down as it evolves, and evolves...

And evolves.

Because of the all options made available by social networking sites, nearly everyone finds it almost a necessity to broadcast things in their lives that would have been considered private business a few decades ago. It’s a way to be up to date with whatever’s going on, and it has even become a game to some. MySpace was a race of how many friends you can acquire, and Friendster’s competitive edge lay in the number and length of testimonials on your profile. LiveJournal made you want more comments on your blog entry, while Multiply was a match between whoever has the prettiest layouts. Twitter was about how many followers and tweets you have, while Facebook managed to combine all of these things together with the dozens of applications available.

But all of these sites’ original intents really do require a lot of investment, personal effort, and information-divulging. It may be the “in” thing to do, but it has gotten many people in trouble for all the stuff they thought were okay to broadcast, only... not. Firstly, some people don’t know the boundaries between really personal information, and end up posting their addresses or telephone numbers online. This can lead to many repercussions, like being kidnapped, stalked, harassed or even stolen from. You’re basically dangling yourself as bait to all the predators out there. Secondly, one must remember that when you post something on the net, it’s basically free-for-all. Even if you lock it, or put it on private mode, it is bound to leak somehow. There are no exceptions. It can vary from those scandalous pictures you send your boyfriend that the whole school ends up seeing, or that scandalous blog that severs your ties with a friend.

And if you pair that up with all the advancements in modern technology, it makes you wonder how everything would be like after a couple of years, doesn’t it?

In the Not-Too-Distant Future

Chelsy (not her real name), an attractive girl of eighteen adjusts the portable surveillance device on her neck, which she and everyone else who was “cool” called the PSD, for short. While most teenagers couldn’t care less about what the acronym really meant, the translation for present earth-dwellers (whose senses of “cool” have, of course, already been deemed as traumatically lame in Chelsy’s time) would be a spycam that people could place in any visible area on their body. While the girls usually place their PSDs somewhere on their necks or ears - fueling the fashion for PSD chokes and accessories in all assorted colors and designs - while the guys had their hats or nose rings. What these devices actually do, on the other hand, is just about to come up.

As soon as Chelsy was satisfied with the PSD’s fit aroud her throat, she logs into her View My Life account on her mobile. Ever since her password failed her nearly four times, she decided to set up a voice-and-retina activated one instead. It cost her over ten thousand pesos (converted to five hundred pesos in present tine), but now that she had in installed she no longer had any fears of getting hacked. Soon, her page registers on the screen, along with the header “Chelsy’s PSD on VML”, and a view of what seems to be whatever’s in front of her. She wasn’t sure, so she waved her hand in front of her neck, and saw a flash of it in her homepage.

As she looked, she noticed that under “Users viewing my PSD right now” was Matt, the hot guy from her French class was listed, and she felt her skin prickle with anticipation. Getting together was a chain of events, which could start by her treating him for lunch sometime, then asking him to be her boyfriend. If he says yes, they could hookup, hopefully for more than a month, at least - she was an old soul, a romantic.

She considered herself different from most people these days, and had always prided herself for not being like those other girls. She didn’t take her PSD to dinner, or to the bathroom, even if the new model had a waterproof function. Sometimes while she dressed in front of the mirror, or when she slept, she forgot to take it off, but that was a minor thing, compared to her friend Julia who never took hers off at all. Chelsy cringed now as she remembered the time Julia’s parents viewed her VML while she was on date. She was grounded for... God knows how long. Chesly hasn’t seen Julia in a party in ages.

Of course Chelsy’s had her own embarrassing PSD moments too. She even sent two anonymously to the local gossip magazine for their PSD section, and got discount coupons at the mall for it. One was about the time she was having a conversation with Hannah about how annoying Gina was, because she knew how much Chelsy liked Matt yet talked and asked him out anyway. She didn’t know that Gina had been viewing her profile during that little chat, and very clearly heard what was being said about her - Gina had those special pod speakers, and Gina also never talked to her again. The other time was just as disastrous, when she burped out loud only to find out that Matt had been viewing her profile, judging from how much ribbing she got for it. She was so embarrassed she considered chucking her PSD in the trash bin.

Thankfully, before that happened, she realized that embarrassing PSD moments was just another aspect of Viewmylife.com. Chelsy would rather suffer a thousand and one of those than deactivate her PSD, even just weeks into having her account, because deactivating it would make her VML page inactive, and that would be so terribly uncool when everyone else’s was active and running.

Besides, without VML, she wouldn’t know what was going on in her friends’ lives. Who needed phones and online messengers when you had VML? She only used that for homework now - almost entirely obsolete. If she relied on them alone, who knows how many parties she could have missed? VML also gets her Matt’s attention, based from how many views she gets from him everyday. Chelsy knew with absolute certainty that VML was important in order to function in her social life. VML was the hype. VML was cool. VML was everything.