Digital World Peer Response 3 (Nov. 13) If I tell you’re hot, will you please put some clothes on and go away?

On her blog, The Spicy View, Sara taps into the celebutante curse in her entry, Puh-lease, Don’t Gimme More.  She rations out the blame that the media placed squarely, and perhaps unfairly, on Britney Spears’ shoulder after a less than stellar performance of her single Gimmie Some More at the 2007 VMAs.

Sara states, “It’s interesting to see the media hype pre-VMAs and post-VMAs about Britney’s comeback.  The media built Brit-Brit up, several years ago, encouraged her to over-sex herself at a young age, and has been waiting for a huge media-meltdown ever since.”

The sexualization of young women is nothing new.  This practice dates back to the Bible.  Today, the lusty Lolita fetish perserveres.  Only now, it verges on caricature.

“She was awful!” I heard various CNN, FOX News (Truckload of salt there.) and MSNBC commentators declare the day after the VMAs.

But, wait!  I refuse to believe Britney was ever alone in this whole thing.  Someone helped lure her into a seductive, Pinocchio tango.

I know.  I know.

She has her voice; her own mind.  Still, she began her career as a minor.  We’re talking 16 or 17-years-old here–that’s about how old she was when Baby One More Time debuted.

I just want to know the role her handlers played in all this.  I wonder how her mom passed the time as her nubile daughter writhed around in body glitter and with pythons on an MTV awards show stage.  I can just see mama Spears somewhere in the background, tallying up album returns.

Everything from hijacked photos of a newly legal Vanessa Hugdens displaying her goodies to Rihanna’s good-girl-gone-bad dominatrix ballerina get-up to crotch shots of a vajayjay popping Lindsay Lohan just feeds the machine that keep the celebutante curse kicking.  What’s worse is that some of these young women are actually talented.  Lindsay Lohan, for instance, has great comedic timing, and I think critics responded to that before she went bonkers and the sex kitten osteoporosis gnawed the marrow straight from her funny bone.  I ponder these celebutantes’ greatest fears and wonder if their deepest anxieties reach beyond gaining weight and turning 30. 

Peer Response 2 (Oct. 12) The Anti-Cyber Space Baller

My baby cousin Timothy Paul (though he’ll always be little Timmy to me) fits the dreamy, high school football star archetype to a tee–well-muscled, acne free, straight white teeth, sickeningly popular and outgoing.  I would hate his guts, if he weren’t my cousin.

“Oh, girl, look!”

Tim and I are at the mall.  A group of Sketcher clad teeny boppers stare him down.

“Look at him,” they coo.  “No, that one–the fine one with the dreads.”

I can almost kiss the swooning.  It’s that close in memory.

Timothy’s popularity with girls is most apparent on his MySpace page.  He shares his player’s paradise with me one Sunday afternoon.  “Want to see something?” he asks, clicking madly.

Before long, his friends’ listing appears.  The page is filled with beautiful young women.

“So these are all your friends?” I ask.

“No,” he responds.  “Just girls who want to get with me.  I’m a baller.”

Blech!  Perhaps this is typical behavior, but I can’t relate to it all.  I feel weird basing friendships online or otherwise, on how badly I want to suck face with someone.

Dayo Akinwande seems to share my dismay in his You want people to know you, right? post on his blog, Warlord Treatment.  He states,

I just never got the repulsive culture of self-absorption that so many–if not all–of [MySpace] members adhere to.  What’s the point of having a million “friends” when most of them will always be strangers that you’ll never meet or have any meaningful connection?

I agree.  There’s a harm in maintaining surface affiliations.  Online business partnerships and classmate affiliations sit fine with me because, well, at least there are commonalities in those unions; substantial ones at that.  At least those relationships reach beyond superficial I’ve-gotta-have-you-now associations.

Digital World Peer Response 1 (Oct. 11) Don’t Be Cruel

Not so fast Bobby Brown!  Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin might take issue with your hit making motto.  And why shouldn’t they?  Afterall, Page and Brin have constructed the largest, all-encompassing Internet search engine to date.  Google helps drive our cultural zeitgeist.  We use it to find and create news; decipher and disseminate political views; and curse and correct rookie platforms.  We use it to make dates and break hearts.  It feeds our lusty, self-serving desires whenever and however we want.  It’s helpful and and harmful; full of Satan and sanctuary.  It’s like search on hyperactive drugs.  That’s almost beautiful and tragic.  It’s the stuff that makes epics great!

Page and Brin birthed this lovely monster.  It’s their digital Frankenstein.  Therefore, these guys can use Paul Buucheit’s “Don’t be evil” slogan as Google’s motto without always practicing it first, right?  Google is theirs afterall.  Who says they have to play by golden rules.

Well, maybe common decency does.  I’m still undecided.

On his blog, The Rupe, Mike Rupert taps into this contradictions inherent in Google’s “Don’t be evil” philosophy when he states,

“Don’t be evil.  Very simple.  Very succint.  Very telling.  But will not meeting the mission lead to the demise of the most powerful media company ever invented.  In John Battelle’s The Search, there is a common thread that weaves in and out of the pages and that is the two Google Founders–young and genius–are so nervous about the inherent evil within humans that they keep a short leash on everything.  Everything they have built–the data networks, the algorithm, the Google Lab, etc–everything goes through them. And in a field where employees jump from company to company, I think there is a reason nearly all former engineers won’t speak on the record.  Battelle himself not so subtly implies that it has made abundantly clear that any public rebellion or even criticism will be crushed.

As I read Mike’s thoughts on Battelle’s book, I grew more and more perplexed over Google’s managerial practices.  Brilliant blood was shed to create a global icon.  Google is an icon.  There is no debate about that.  Still, I wonder how powerful it will remain if the corporation heads opt to slave drive their workers.  The whole idea of Internet search kind of feeds the dream of an open source online community–a free marketplace where information is given and taken, so long as it is done fairly.  How can Page and Brin hope to lead the way in this effort if they, as Mike puts it, “keep a very short leash” on everything in-house.  I understand they want to maintain their masterpiece.  That’s necessary.  However, I see a danger in this thinking as well.  I would hate for Google’s founders to go the Steve Jobs route.  (Speaking of tight leashes).  That guy, though equally brilliant, pushed Apple employees to their absolute limit, gnawing at their shins as they worked.  Jobs has not been above, “screaming at employees to the point of hyperventilation, firing a P.R. consultant and refusing to pay her for completed work and taking enough stock options in his animation company, Pixar, to make himself a billionaire while leaving squat for all but a few of its longtime workers.”

Keeping this in mind, I wonder what kind of brave new world Page and Brin hope to cultivate at Google Inc.  If not an evil one, then what kind exactly?