About a week ago I read a piece on Rhino Records' site that I found via Philo's blog. The piece is about MySpace and how addictive it is, and its title is "Confessions of a Validation Junkie." The author doesn't go far toward explaining the title explicitly. He mostly just talks about the ridiculous time sink that MySpace is, and proving he's hip and knows lots of current youth slang, he's not about explaining why people do it; but they obviously do it for validation, if not for the slim chance that they'll hook up with their next significant other or favorite band, I guess. (my favorite part of the article is when he mentions the bands that have hundreds of "friends" on myspace, but no one comes to their shows because they're all... on myspace! heh.) It seems people relish keeping score, having an actual numerical measurement of their supposed social worth they can look up any time and work on, relatively risk-free.
Anyway, I have realized that there's another extreme example of validation addiction on Flickr. More and more I've been noticing people who post a photo (or all their photos) to literally dozens of pools. It's insane. Why do they do this? Obviously to get as much notice as possible. Flickr has become an eyeball market of high intensity.
It's weird, because for me, Flickr is just an easy place to upload photos and share them with friends and family, and maybe interact with a few select other people who share some narrowly focused interest that I have. I belong to about 12 groups, like "Indymedia" and "Talking Back to Ads" and "Public Space and Its Discontents." But some people post to more groups than I've ever even looked at, much less joined. And it takes TIME to post to that many groups!
It's remarkable to me that so many people crave the attention of strangers so badly - and for so little. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'd love for every single human on the earth to see my film about Juarez, but I really don't see the worth of posting a photo of your cat, or yet another sunset, to 39 Flickr groups, other than to stroke your own ego.
There are some damaged, needy people out there. Is the Internet helping?
Posted by steev at Enero 18, 2006 12:32 PM