July 27, 2002

  • Stage-blogging: are you guilty?


    Stage-blogging: Attempting to impress others and aggrandize one's own ego by blogging in an animated, theatrical manner. 


    Are you guilty?


    Some of you are as guilty as sin.  Wait: technically, a sin isn't guilty; it's the sinner that's guilty. 


    Me?  I've held so much back from Xanga about myself out of a necessity for secrecy that if I were to come all out now you'd definitely think I was a stage-blogger!  Ha!


    (Or maybe I'm just a hollow man inventing stories about secrecy to impress a sense of mystery?  Stage-blogger!)


    Here's a related high-tech phenomenon:


    Some mobile users tend to make a virtue of the lack of privacy, enjoying and exploiting the presence of third parties as a unique opportunity to put something of themselves on display by stage-phoning. On a train, for example, a mobile can be used as a way of broadcasting a great deal of information to a pretty much captive audience. . . . Calls can be invented for the purpose, in which case the mobile can communicate even when it is not in use. On the elevated train in Chicago, a young man talks on a mobile in some style. He's discussing an important deal and at the same time trying to impress a group of girls in the same part of the train. It all goes well until disaster strikes: his phone goes off and interrupts him in mid-sentence, and his fictional deal is exposed.

    —Sadie Plant, "On the mobile: The effects of mobile telephones on social and individual life," Motorola Inc, October 28, 2001

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