The World is Your Stage...and Facebook is the ticket vendor

I work with teenagers. Whether in school or church settings, they have all become completely obsessed with online profiles. The church ones flock to Facebook, my school ones to MySpace. And all this leads to problems. High school drama takes a new extreme. And worst of all, the world revolves around you and your profile. I've had small chats with many teenagers and peers who struggle with this, but a recent article said it well. The educator, sociologist, and theologian in me were all intrigued.
Relevant Magazine published an article called "The Problem of Pride in the Age of Twitter" by Brett McCracken. Part of me wishes I had written this article first! But he did a better job than I could have. Mine would have been more "sociological".
McCracken focused on the idea that we are obsessed with defining ourselves via play-by-play status updates and "....communication is no longer about learning things from people or sharing experiences; it's about knowing what they're doing and how they're feeling, or at least how they want the world to perceive them as such" Enter the drama.
It reminds me of the sociological concept of the looking-glass self. It was a term coined by Charles Cooley in 1902...that's over a hundred years ago. Apparently the problem is not new. Encyclopedia.com explains, "an individual's sense of self is derived from the perceptions of others. Just like the reflections in a mirror, the self depends on the perceived responses of others; or, as he himself puts it, ‘each to each a looking glass reflects the other that doth pass.'" It continues to explain,"The looking-glass self has three components: the imagination of our appearance to the other person; the imagination of their judgement of that appearance; and self feelings, such as pride."
If these explanations don't make sense, google the term. There are TONS of web pages dedicated to explaining it. Basically, the idea is that we think the whole world is watching us. The idea is that I am an actor on a stage, and everyone is watching my life. The way the "audience" perceives me defines who I am. So I strive to present myself the way I want the audience to see me. Of course, the audience is fictional. Or is it?
In Cooley's day, the audience was almost completely in one's mind. I remember walking through high school with a bad haircut thinking EVERYONE was watching, judging. They weren't. The Internet - Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and Blogs have finally given the self-conscious teenager (as well as everyone else) an audience. Ever freak out because a "bad" picture of you was tagged? Or spend hours posing for a cute profile pic? Written a blog or status update just to get empathy? Created a YouTube video to show off? Why? Because you want people to think of you as attractive. You want people to understand where you are coming from. You want people to see you shine.
When it all comes down to it, things haven't changed much since Cooley created the theory in 1902. Thanks to the Internet, everyone is welcome to be part of the audience. But I think most the audience still only consists of a select few. I have over 400 friends on facebook. I sometimes read updates on my newsfeed, but don't really care about most of those. The problem is that we THINK everyone cares. We insist people comment on our walls, blogs, status updates, videos, etc because we really want to know how people perceive us and that people care.
This blog will be "readable" by over 400 facebook friends and anyone who finds it via google. My pride could tell myself "All these people will be transformed by my amazing words". Reality is that only a few will read, and even fewer comment. And that's ok.
McCracken's article concluded that the problem of pride is not new to the church but "Technology has only exacerbated it. In times like these-when it's easier and more alluring than ever to be or feel important-Christians must remember that we're not called to be viral superstars. We're called to be living sacrifices. We're not instructed to make ourselves look as good as possible in front of the largest audience we can; no, we are instructed to deny ourselves and humbly follow Christ." What do you think?