Metapomo?

Last Saturday was a usual slow Saturday working at Starbucks. In between customers, my co-worker pal and I were trying to perfect our latte art skills. I use the word "skills" loosely because neither of us have any. At one point in the morning, I hear Chad yell over to me, "I think I made a rooster!" - half jokingly, half seriously. That's the kind of thing working at a coffee shop does to a person. Quicker than I normally am on a Saturday morning, I retorted with, "Shit Baristas Say." While it was completely true and gave us both a laugh, it got me to thinking about how much the internet impacts our daily lives. 

Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, blogs, memes. Almost everything is thought about in internet terms. I can't tell you how often my friends and I reference memes in a day. After my friend Katie and I do anything remotely awkward, we say "forever alone" and attempt to make the meme face. How many of us pose for photo ops hoping to score a new profile picture? I'm guilty! Whenever I have a passing thought, I consider tweeting it. If I say something amusing, my friends tell me "you should tweet that." We are at a point where we think in #hashtags. In the past few weeks I've started the habit of saying #firstworldproblems. For example, just the other day I exclaimed "I hate when TV shows all go on commercial at the same time. #firstworldproblems." This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it is a new thing. It is a new way of thinking, of interacting. In a way, it is incredibly fun. It is like we are all in on one big inside joke. It is uniting. These viral jokes are shared with everyone who participates in social media. 

There is such a fight for individuality, but at the same time, there is such a strong need for acceptance. We all post things to Tumblr hoping to be the first to post something new. On the other hand, we also want to be "reblogged" which just means other people taking your original content for their own blog. In one foul swoop, we want to create something no one has seen before, but we also want recognition for it. The same can be said for Pinterest and StumbleUpon. These social media sites are the mere definition of postmodernism. These sites are collages of culture. 

I remember in my first year cinema studies class, our last topic was Postmodernism, or "pomo" as my professor laughingly referred to it. Five years ago, (when I took this class), it seems we were just approaching the hey-day of Pomo. I don't think any of us sitting in that classroom fully grasped what it was going to become in our culture, even though we were the ones helping to create it. A few years later, and we are all making references to things that are in and of themselves, already references. 

Whether it is a good or bad thing, we are all living under a microscope now more than ever. But it is of our own doing. It is our own microscope, which luckily for us, we can use to magnify whichever parts of ourselves we want.