Would websites like THIS have existed before there were digital cameras?

[silverscape]

<p>I have a question. Maybe it's more of a philosophical question I guess. But let's be honest and realistic for a moment...would websites like <em><strong>THIS</strong></em> (link below) have existed before there were digital cameras? (Especially digital point and shoot cameras). <br /><br /><a href="http://www.emo-corner.com/">http://www.emo-corner.com/</a></p>

<p>I've been around computers my entire life, and the internet has been around for most of my life. I think I actually started going online around maybe 1995. I saw all kinds of stuff on the internet when I was a kid. But I just can't imagine a website like <em>that</em> existing back then. Heck, I can't even imagine seeing something like that maybe <strong>4 or 5 years ago</strong>. What does this say about society? I mean, really, are we reaching a whole new sad level of narcissism? A whole website devoted <em>entirely</em> to emo kids taking pictures of <em>themselves</em>. And in a way, are digital point and shoot cameras encouraging narcissism?<br /><br />Before you answer, think about it truthfully and seriously...look at that website, and would you have seen websites like that before there were digital cameras?

<p> </p>

</p>

[bobatkins]

<p>No</p>

[joe_jackson4]

<p>"I mean, really, are we reaching a whole new sad level of narcissism?"</p>

<p>Nah, it's just what such teenage-minded types do... Dress like crap, look "moody", act "cool"... Easy... :) In my younger days, punk/indie/rock/student clubs were chock-full of clueless, self-obsessed, band-worshipping posers like this... Loved every minute of it, myself... :)</p>

[Matt Laur]

<p>Never mind that. It's the fact that the nitwit who's running the site can't make it past the first paragraph without half a dozen horrible spelling and grammar mistakes. Idiots. Poor, emotional, self-obsessed, no-language-skills drama-queens. Egads, and they probably vote (and not just for the demographic-pandering Hot Emo Dude on American Idol this year). </p>

[lex_jenkins]

<p>Yeh, there were similarly self indulgent websites before digital cameras. They weren't as obvious for various reasons. It took longer to scan prints or film. There weren't as many narcissistic young people online before the AOL revolution of the late '90s (plenty of old fart narcissists like me, tho'). And it started out with very lo-rez webcams, not digital cameras.</p>

<p>It may look new but it's not. The earliest blogs I saw, full of emo angst, including early incorporation of Flash and all the self indulgence you could handle, were around 2000-2001.</p>

<p>Before then every generation of self-styled rebels and outcasts used whatever tools of communication were state of the art for that era.</p>

<p>The emo angst self indulgence is rather tame and charmingly anachronistic nowadays. Kids who are into that fad at least have found some structure and peer support group that may help them ride out the emotional roller coaster of youth.</p>

<p>The real cutting edge - quite literally - is self destruction, self mutilation and self humiliation for the pleasure of an anonymous audience, all hooting and hollering, urging each other deeper into almost unimaginable nihilism. Now *that's* something that the web has helped foster among people and in places where once it would have been anomalous.</p>

[GerrySiegel]

<p>It doesn't surprise me. They have a name for it, not kinky,not weirdo,not cool, not punk, not Goth, not whatever, but Emo. I am glad they have a sense of belonging to a clan without a downbeat cynicism.</p>

<p>Yesterday I was at the Army Post near our home. In the cafeteria, the soldiers all had buzz cuts and sidewalls. Army has regs against even backward caps and doo rags and droopy pants w/ butt cheeks over the scivvies, and a bunch of stuff. In walks this hghschool youth with a spiked row on his head. Tall spikes... All vaselined up. It stood out. And that is what its all about,huh?. If he were with his fellow spikers or emus/emos,no stand out, so what then? Western cowboy hat and string tie? Walk around with fly unbuttoned? I am going too far, but it could be the next fashion, don't laugh. gs</p>

[starvy]

<p>you people are too old and getting older by day. let the kids be what they are. the advent of the digital coincides with the mass appeal of the internet. the expressive medium that is the net provides for a whole new agenda and platform to exploit that agenda. the underground club scene, small magazines and bbs/mod based services provided for such groups to express themselves with rather less exposure for the outside body to gaze in.<br>

emo has changed rather drastically over the last five years and the contemporary emo is certainly more than the middle class appeal it had in the late nineties and early this century. so the proliferation of digital cameras might certainly have helped, but no more so than any other expressive forms. image is very important like all crazes, however, the controlling of that image is not so much with the kiddy user despite what youtube, myspace and facebook would let us think.</p>

[luis_g]

<p> I think it is wonderful that kids are in these social network sites, and pictures are an integral part of it.</p>

<p> They're just doing what every generation does, trying to find themselves, tasting the adult world, without cutting the umbilical cord just yet, finding their way through the labor pains of being reborn as individuals.</p>

<p>I went to an art show at a skatepark last weekend, had a great time, and though I may not "get" all the fashions and signifiers, I understand, applaud, and wish them well. After the mess of a world we are leaving them, thank God they're kind enough not to come after us with cleavers. Or baking us into Soylent Green.</p>

<p> What next? A diatribe against fixie bikes? Lowbrow art? After what my friends and I went through in terms of reverse ageism, discrimination, and social disdain for our explorations during our teen years, I applaud kids for eluding their parents' (our) generational drag shadow, and finding their own identity in their own way. The fact that it includes photography, and that it helps them define and proclaim their identity, gladdens my heart.</p>

<p> Kids today are just fine. Imagine what things will be like 20 years from now. Those Emos & Hipsters will be curmudgeoning about the next thing right here on PN. :-)</p>

<p> </p>

[joe_jackson4]

<p>At the end of the day it's just something to do... Gotta waste yer youth somehow, after all, so you may as well do it well, eh...? :)</p>

<p>And hey, if (in the mind of the participants...) it slightly increases your probability of getting laid with some stunningly-stoned neo-hippy nympho after a great gig, well, don't knock it... :)</p>

[phyrpowr]

<p>Well, websites didn't exist before the web, (follow this to reductio ad absurdium)<br>

We had to find each other through flyers on phone poles when I was young and cool</p>

[jpo3136b]

<p>They will probably serve as an effective platform for serving advertising with tissue, psychologists, psychiatrists, pharmaceuticals, hair styling and eye makeup. Someone should probably sell them a picture about those things. Self interest has always been around and been a driving and influencing factor. But, I don't see how digital cameras would really be connected; teenagers have always been teenagers, except when I was one; then, we were exceptionally enlightened, dynamic and intelligent; but then, we're GenX.</p>

[phyrpowr]

<p>Listen here, O'Keefe-Odom, I am a <em>boomer</em>, and invented sex drugs and rock & roll..or think I might have, some parts are a little vague</p>

[chelsea]

<p>I read an anthropologist's theory not long ago that speculated that most of the ochre/animal fat pictographs left by ancient peoples on caves and cliffs thousands of years ago were painted by teenaged boys. Kids are kids, and their expressions are essentially the same, whether using mud of many colours or modern technology.</p>

<p> </p>

[silverscape]

<p>Starvy (and a few others), you're missing the point entirely. I am <strong>NOT</strong> talking about a "generation" ago. I'm not some old man talking about something 20 or 30 years ago. (I was <em>born </em>in 1977). Did you even read anything I said? I am literally talking about a trend that is happening in the past <strong>5 YEARS.</strong> Maybe since around 2000 or 2001 at the very earliest.</p>

<p>I don't know how else I could have explained it to make it clearer. Like I said, I have been around computers my entire life, and the internet has been around most of my life. And I'm telling you, that up until VERY recently, I did NOT see websites like this. And trust me, I've seen a lot of weird stuff on the internet. I've been on the internet since I was 16 years old. I've been doing pretty much everything online and downloading music and movies starting in the late 1990's. (Anyone remember Napster?) So come off it. if you got me figured as some old man talking about the "good ole' days" then you've got me pegged totally wrong. The dude that started Napster is about my age. So think about that for a moment. <br /><br />And how old are you, Starvy? I not even really Generation X. I'm somewhere between Gen X and Gen Y. (It seems like they're always coming up with new names for us...in the late 1990's we were "Generation Next.").</p>

<p>Anyway...my whole point is that this is NOT just like any other rebellious counter-culture. This is something new and just plain...weird. I mean seriously, wearing tight pants, dying your hair black, and generally trying to look as feminine as you can...and then an entire website just to post pictures of <em>yourself</em>? Yeah, when I was a kid in the 1990's maybe we had our things...the whole grunge thing, wearing baggy pants, or maybe even the Goth thing that was popular for a while after the movie "The Crow" came out. (sometimes I think the emo thing is just an off-shoot of Goth). But we defintiely didn't run around taking pictures of ourselves. Well, I'd tell you what emo really looks like, but I don't want to get in trouble with a moderator. <br /><br />So I don't know. Again, let's ask the question realistically and honestly. Would there have been websites like this before there were digital cameras? I don't know how else to explain this. If you were on Google and just doing a random search before around maybe 2002 or 2003 or so, you wouldn't have seen websites like this (emo kids taking a bunch of lame pictures of themselves, and creating an entire website just to show how emo they are.) Coincidentally, that's also when digital point and shoot digital cameras became popular.<br>

<br />It seems like most people who think this is just another trend of kids being rebellious are older, or don't really go online that much. So maybe you just don't really see the difference. I have been online most of my life, and I'm saying that I CAN see the difference. And this whole thing about emos posting pictures of themselves is reaching a whole new level of weirdness.</p>

[lex_jenkins]

<p>Chris, I can assure you, if you haven't seen this kind of stuff before, you weren't looking hard enough. The only thing that's changed is that you just discovered it.</p>

<p>Which is probably a good thing. It means you haven't wasted your online time in a bottomless pit of dissipation.</p>

 

[silverscape]

<p>yeah, but Lex...where? I mean, the internet has been around since the mid-90's (or at least that was about when I started going online). But it's not like there were a bunch of websites with people taking pictures of <em>themselves</em> in grunge or goth, which were the popular styles at that time. But how come it seems like coincidentally it all started right around the time when digital P&S cameras became popular? The whole emo thing is not just a rebellious sub-culture. I mean, what sub-culture tries to look "rebellious" by wearing girl's pants and a studded belt? LOL<br /><br />Ok, I'm not saying that people using digital cameras is what started the whole emo thing. Of course not. But what I am saying is that it is feeding into the narcissism of it. I know we're starting to get off the topic and delving more into a sociological discussion here. I don't know exactly how the whole emo thing got started. Some people claim it started as a genre of music in the 1980's. I was a little kid then, but I can tell you that I NEVER heard of 'emo' until recently. It definitely wasn't around in the 1990's. The 90's were a tough time to be a kid, let me tell you. Emos wouldn't have survived. But now the whole emo thing is about drawing attention to themselves, and almost like they try to portray themselves like victims. And they all seem to <em>love</em> taking pictures of themselves. Do a random Google image search for 'emo' and you'll see what I mean. But would they have done all that if they didn't have a cheap digital P&S camera?<br /><br />I have actually talked to people who said they specifically bought a digital camera just to take pictures for MySpace.

 

<br>

That's what I mean. </p>

[luis_g]

<p>" Anyway...my whole point is that this is NOT just like any other rebellious counter-culture. This is something new and just plain...weird. I mean seriously, wearing tight pants, dying your hair black, and generally trying to look as feminine as you can...and then an entire website just to post pictures of <em>yourself</em> ?"</p>

<p> This is like every rebellious youth culture (there hasn't really been a mass counterculture since 1972), except, it's more web than reality-based.</p>

<p> Tight pants? Dyeing hair black? Not so new, I'm afraid. I realize punk was before your time, but tight pants and hair dyed black were commonplace. A cliche', frankly. Methinks you're suffering from a case of premature hardening of the categories.</p>

<p> As early as 1985, there were proto-networking sites like The Well. Through the 90's the emphasis was linking users via chat or e-mail (Classmates and Six Degrees, for example). This shifted towards its present form in the early 90s, with the familiar players and formats (like Friendster, MySpace, Yahoo, and Bebo) in place by 2006. User photographs were used in chat rooms and profiles long ago. But the heavy emphasis on pictures didn't take off until about 7+ years ago.</p>

<p> Anyway, in my opinion, this is absolutely nothing to fret about, and a perfect use for cheapo P&S's.</p>

<p> Seems perfectly normal to me, and an historical extension all the way from the Usenet days.</p>

<p> </p>

[leicaglow]

<p>Luis, I agree with your first post. We can't judge people on their style. I get criticized for photographing in a suit. It's just my style, and I studied under a Frenchman whose style rubbed off on me. I'm glad kids have a way to relate. We have a whole new generation that is able to communicate and understand each other in ways we were never able to before. Emo is not different that Gothe or any other fad. Certainly this generation is using photography in whole new ways to convey information and communicate with eacy other. I think the question about digital making it possible, can be applied to the whole Internet as a medium.</p>

[silverscape]

<p>LOL...well, ok, since I guess it's just the lastest trend.... maybe I'll start wearing black and I'll dye my hair. I guess I should start buying my clothes from Hot Topic too. I hate emo music though, especially the band Taking Back Sunday. So that might be a problem. I'll start writing blogs and poems to tell the world how lonely and miserable I am. I'll take a million pictures of myself and post them online. Maybe I should start with my profile picture that I posted here? (except that it's not really emo...it's more "retro" I guess, since I'm holding a Graflex 22 TLR). <br /><br />I have an 8 megapixel digital camera. I could use that. It's better than wasting film. I'll use my 35mm and medium format film for real pictures :) <br /><br />I went to a bar about a week ago with a couple of friends, and there was a cover charge because a band was playing. It ended up being an emo band. I wanted a refund.</p>

[lex_jenkins]

<p>Chris, if I could, I'd take you back on a magical mystery tour of my misspent youth that spanned the post-Woodstock era, the '70s New York juice bars (and Quaaludes), the glam era, the disco daze, the pop culture phenomenon known as "punk" (tho' it predated the Sex Pistols by several years), New Wave and disco revival of the mid-'80s, the early precursor to the goths, emos and scene kids of the late '80s and... well, by 1990 I'd finally settled down and stopped doing that stuff. Still have most of my brain cells in tow, if not actually intact.</p>

<p>Youthful narcissism is nothing new. Neither is the ironic celebration of expressing one's individuality by following a rigidly defined code to ensure you wouldn't be ostracized by your fellow rebels. And documenting these excesses through photography is absolutely not new at all, in the slightest. It was being done before I was born in 1957. The equivalents to that emo website were underground newspapers and magazines, poster art and barroom and club walls covered in photos documenting the same youthful "ain't we cool" behavior. My own photographic history proves I wasn't above some of the trendiness and conscious flaunting of being "different", just like everyone else was being different the same way.</p>

<p>And if you need further evidence that this is nothing new even by web standards and the digital camera era, dig back to the early part of this decade, to YTMND, SA (and their bastard child, 4chan) and others. Dig back deeper, assuming those abandoned "old web" sites are still around, and you'll find the same stuff was scanned from Polaroids and other prints via flatbed scanners, even fax-to-web, anything to digitize an image and get it online. I still have crappy old GIF porn of gals with the same type of emo-kid look, and that stuff dates back to the late '80s. Before then photos were digitized to ASCII art and sown throughout the pre-web internets and BBS's.</p>

<p>Again, the only thing new is that it's new to you. And I agree with Luis 100%. What these kids are doing is actually relatively healthy compared with some of the crap I've seen online during the past few years. The worst that can be said is some folks might call 'em sissies and some of 'em may feel awfully silly about those cutting scars 20 years from now. That's nothing compared with the truly toxic stuff going on in the sewers of the interbutt.</p>

[silverscape]

<p>Ok, fair enough Lex. I guess narcissism has always been around in photography in one way or another. But maybe I just didn't see it as much when I was a kid, because we couldn't afford to waste film by taking a bunch of pictures of ourselves. I mean that seriously, we just didn't do that when I was a kid in the 80's and 90's. I mean yeah, I'm sure everyone has screwed around with a camera and turned it around and took a bad picture of yourself. I did that with my dad's Polaroid camera a couple of times. I had a couple of friends that made their own websites as early as 1997 or so (WELL before sites like MySpace) and they had maybe one or two pictures of themselves that they scanned and posted from a film camera...which someone else took of them of course. Or maybe they had a couple of pictures from a webcam. But the idea of posting 20 pictures of YOURSELF just wasn't heard of. But I was just a kid/young adult then and maybe I was kind of naive and didn't know everything else that was going on the internet. You're probably right that some form of it was around then, but I just personally didn't see it or experience it.<br /><br />Still, I have to admit...it's true, I never thought I would see the day when being sissy would be "popular." People have the right to dress and act however they want. But I also have the right to say that emo <em>is</em> kind of sissy and extremely narcissistic. Like I said, the 1990's was a very tough time to be a kid. (I could tell you horror stories of what it was like to be in middle school in California after the LA riots).</p>

[leon_b1]

<p>People have always got a kick out of looking at pictures of themselves. Looking at ourselves <em>from the outside</em> is one experience we're denied in everyday life. I assume you've seen one of the most characteristic reactions of people when you show them photographs you've taken of them: a kind of delighted outrage, embarrassment quickly turning to fascination. What could be more gratifying than external confirmation of one's own existence? There's something of the same sentiment in people's desire to drag out their own old albums. All that's been changed by the Internet is that you can now, for better or worse, drag them out for anyone in the world who can get to a PC.</p>

<p>I remember the first primitive websites, and some of them were incredibly narcissistic. All that digital P&S and social networking has done is to make such expressions of narcissism rather easier.</p>

[pankaj purohit]

<p>Very bad website, I clicked the EMO BOYS link and it took me on the search engine and I closed the website, very bad. I usually see this kind of website which has dead links like this. If this can be possible than what do you want to say...? it is only possible in digital time period...? I think yes.</p>

[patrick j dempsey]

<p>When I first discovered myspace years ago, THAT was pretty much the entire myspace scene... scene kids. In many ways, early myspace WAS a whole website devoted entirely to emo kids taking pictures of themselves. Heck, I learned about it when I very very very briefly went out with a scene girl who was using it to keep up with the hairstyles of her trendy friends from NJ. At that time I considered it to be a mildly interesting way to meet tragically broken girls, or more often, just to have fun seeing what kind of narcissistic idiocy was welling up from the younger crowd. Now serious professional businesses and your grandmother are on it.</p>

<p>The internet didn't really exist in the 1980's. At least not in the sense it does today, and certainly not in the sense of "kewl" kids being even remotely interested in it. In the 1980's, computers were for nerds and dorks, and even the "coolest" part of computers, which was video games, was the domain of bratty kids and nerds and dorks. If you had colored hair, tatoos, piercings, listened to tragic music, wore torn or black clothing in the 1980's you probably considered computers to either be a symbol of the business cult of the yuppie class, or of spoiled kids. Sure, a handful of those kids made up the "cyberpunk" scene, but I don't think the ACTUAL cyberpunk scene was anywhere near as large then as the media made it out to be. </p>

<p>In fact, I noticed this attitude was prevalent well into the 90's and didn't really start to turn around until Myspace. Digital cameras made it easy to post photos of yourself, uploaded easily from the camera directly to Myspace with no editing. In fact, many of the first wave of Myspacers knew virtually nothing about computers and still considered using the computer for anything OTHER than Myspace as nerditude, but I would say that the current generation of kids between 16 and 22 is VERY computer savvy. Let's face it, they GREW UP with Myspace. It became a driving interest to use computers and the depth and realism of the modern computer game attracts more people than just the hyper-nerds of 25 years ago. It's really a chicken or the egg type of thing... but if scanning Polaroids was easier, and the internet had existed in it's current depth 25 years ago, you can bet that their would be millions of photographs of rainbow hairdos and Madonna-wanna-bes clogging up the tubes.</p>

[silverscape]

<p>hey Patrick, good points...but I kind of have to disagree with you about MySpace. I started using it right about the time it first became popular. One of my friends told me about it, and that was how I found out about it. That was around maybe around 2004 or so. At that time, it really was just a networking site, and it was actually mostly people around my age, in their 20's (at the time). It was mostly just people keeping in touch with their friends, or looking up old friends from school. It definitely was <strong>NOT</strong> the teenage emo-fest that it is now. I got bored with it and deleted my page, but I ended up starting another one around 2005 or 2006. That's the same one I have now.</p>

<p>Teenagers are really not the cutting edge trend-setters that older people seem to think they are. They're mostly just monkey see, monkey do. At first, it was mostly college-age people who were on MySpace. The emo kids found out about this "cool new site" called MySpace, and they basically just took it over. But it was NOT like that when it first started. That's actually a relatively new thing.</p>

<p>The emo kids taking over it and posting blurry pictures of themselves in front of a bathroom mirror didn't really start until like maybe 2006 or so. In fact, I remember because "Tom" started doing that as a joke.</p>