As a member of the millennial generation, which is infatuated with social media sites such as Facebook and MySpace, I found it imperative to step back and contemplate my involvement, which I feared I didn’t fully understand. This realization ignited when my 89-year-old Grandmother asked to see my Facebook page. Suddenly images of my "barely there" hula girl costume on Halloween, and my 21 St birthday flooded my head, and I opted for sending her pictures in the mail instead.

If I had photographs of myself posted online that I didn’t want my Grandmother to see, much less my Mother, employers, or heaven forbid strangers, then why were they there? At that very moment I began to realize how slowly, over time, the boundaries between public and private had begun to blur not only for myself, but also for this entire generation. Have we deluded ourselves into thinking that the Internet is capable of privacy?

After looking through picture after picture of friends, and friends of friends of ex-boyfriend’s on Facebook and MySpace, patterns quickly began to appear. Provocative imagery and sexual content was consistent within the majority of images as well as the obsessive nature of updating profiles, equivalent to one’s very own reality T.V show. When comparing footage of reality T.V shows such as Rock of Love or Tila Tequila (content that is overtly sexual and explicit) it began to look as though these profiles were simply re-enacting imagery we are consuming through “real life” television shows. It has become second nature to post images without contemplating what we are exposing of ourselves or who could be seeing it. Are we all seeking the limelight through subconsciously over exposing our private lives?

Unable to fully address the many layers that relate to my research, I wanted to include library books as symbolic forms of the ongoing dialogue one can have surrounding social media. I found that the contents of the photographs I was collecting led to many layered questions about feminism and sexuality in our society, the differences between men and women, and even what constitutes pornography. I wanted to also tap into this generation’s stereotype of living virtually, addressing the idea that perhaps we have become lazy and impatient with our research. The Internet has become a universal medium for obtaining information, and according to Wired’s Olive Thompson, it is "the perfect recall of silicon memory".

In Nicholas Carr’s article Is Google Making Us Stupid?, he elaborates this point by explaining that we are a generation that has become accustomed to the immediacy of the Internet to the extent that we are unable to engage ourselves in a book or lengthy article. Research that once required days in the library can now be done in minutes. Carr makes it clear that this instant gratification comes at a price, and that computers “supply the stuff of thought, but they alsoshape the process of thought, and what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away [our] capacity for concentration and contemplation.” As we become a generation that is obsessed with social media and fame, more than the exposure of our private lives is shifting. How we digest, interpret, and use information is beginning to change. Inevitably, these changes influence our ethics, morals, and how we live our lives.

I too have participated in this virtual existence, and I do not find it wrong or even necessarily dangerous to explore sexuality and identity in this type of space or medium, but the harm comes when believing that these actions are innocuous, and not completely understanding where this accepted sexuality and comfort comes from, or how digital and social media is influencing the way we think and express ourselves.