To snoop or not to snoop?

It’s the big fat dilemma my newly vidblogging siblings have so rudely placed on my ethical plate.

You see, I’ve been tinkering with online video for the past 7 years … when YouTube was just a glimmer in some soon-to-be-filthy-rich adolescent’s mind, HD didn’t extend much past the Hollywood back lot, and “my space” was something girls told me they needed way too often.

When I began to toss crudely edited clips of my personal life up on the sprawling tubes of the interweb, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect (I called it “Docutainment” at the time). Not like I had millions of fascinated fans, a couple dozen at best, but frankly it was quite a bit easier to just shoot stuff that was going to happen anyway, rather than fabricate a scenario and plunge headfirst into the world of fiction. Friends can be actors without knowing any lines, and there’s opening credits when you wake up in the morning (you can only see them if you look really hard).

My vidblogs grew over time from just ‘look at this fun stuff we did at the bowling alley, internet!’ to something deeply personal, real, and really public.

The image of my life that I projected to my conservative family wasn’t the reality I clipped into my videos. I was an open secret, total disclosure a couple keystrokes away. I even met my girlfriend (now happily together for over three years) on video, and still shocked my parents with the news we had be living together nearly two years after blogging it.

One can only assume the world has already had its first YouTube divorce (’Honey! I swear I didn’t know who that girl walking around naked in the background of Tuesday’s post was! … by the way, what’s your username?”), and the sun must have set on countless MySpace groundings (”No hanging out with your friends until you take that creepy 46-year-old off your top 8, young lady!”). The truth of the matter is that your public private life will eventually effect your personal private life.

So now that my 18-year-old sister and 16-year-old brother have picked up on the more and more common practice of vidblogging, what sort of ethical dilemma do I have? I didn’t care what a far-flung visitor stumbling in from Burundi thought about what I did (check your web stats, he’s been to your site too, don’t ask how) but when it’s your flesh and blood, is it better to keep a distance or delve right in? Already I can see the subtle differences between the kids I remember from the family dinner table, and the near-adults hanging out with their friends and living their lives in front of the world on YouTube.

It’s hard to foresee all the consequences of our generation’s newfound openness, but let’s all cross our fingers and just hope sons and daughters yet unborn keep creepy 46-year-olds off their top 8.

Please promulgate us on the interweb.

Posted by Justin at 3:15 pm on Friday, April 20th, 2007 in Internet, Media, Vlogs. You can follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.