A few weeks back, I reviewed "American Teen," an intimate documentary of one school year in the lives of some Indiana teens. It was an amazingly candid portrait of the lives of these kids, with hazing, breakups and breakdowns portrayed completely unguarded.
There was no escaping the feeling, though, that these kids — all raised on a diet of reality TV — were playing themselves, that however real their experiences, they were amping them up for the camera.
That's pretty much par for the course for Generation Facebook; central to youth experience in the West these days is the breakdown between the public and private spheres of life. The idea of an honest, unguarded moment being captured by a camera will seem a quaint one in but a few more years. We are all actors, now, with the savvy to turn it on when the red record light is flashing. Our private lives become infected by artificiality, by performance, as mediated experience infects "real life."