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- NEW YORK - You
have a private
life, and probably like to keep it that way. So what
would inspire you
to place yourself in the vigilant, unblinking public
eye?
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- You
already have unprecedented access to others' private
lives, especially
if you have cable or Internet access. You can watch "ordinary"
people with a video camera wired to the Internet " called a Webcam
" or you can see shows like MTV's The Real World, which packs a
conflict-prone
group of young people together in a house with the
cameras rolling.
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- You might also wonder what psychological consequences
this kind
of exposure has on the people who open their lives to the world.
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- "You start
thinking you really are important, and
that you're someone
special," said Dr. Robert Butterworth, a Los Angeles-based
clinical psychologist. "Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall " and when
you fall, you're not famous anymore, and that can cause a lot of anger
and depression."
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- The people who actually choose to make their private
lives public argue critics just don't understand. They say they're on the
cutting edge of a new form of communication.
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- "After 20 minutes on the
first day, we all totally
forgot about it. ... It's a lifestyle
constraint, but it's not the psychologically
intense experience you'd
think it would be," said Erik Vidal, 23,
a former Oberlin College
student who launched www.hereandnow.net when he
was a senior. The site
documents the lives of Vidal and a group of his
roomates.
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- "These doctors
don't personally know anybody who
is on camera," added Ana Voog,
33, owner and star of anacam.com. "They
give this pop psychology
guess, and it irks me when somebody doesn't even
know anyone on camera.
... I wish I could say something that's shocking
for all the
psychologists out there," she said wryly. "Like,
'I feel
damaged somehow, and I'm a perverted extrovert!'"
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- Praying to
Narcissus?
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- If you have the urge to be famous and broadcast the most
inimate details of your life, it often means you have a narcissistic
personality,
experts say. And that can translate into a callous
disregard for the welfare
of others.
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- "You remember Leona
Helmsley, talking about the
'little people,'" he said.
"They're also hypersensitive to slights."
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- "We all have some degree
of it," said Dr. Armond
Aserinsky, a psychologist from North
Wales, Penn., who specializes in media
issues. He explained that you,
like most people, probably have the personality
trait, but that
sometimes narcissism can cross the line into a pathological
personality
disorder (see quiz).
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- Having cameras follow your life "used to be just
a common fantasy adolescents would have that their own life was being
taken
down by a biographer," he said. "That what they were
doing was
so important, that every burp was being recorded. What's
happened is that
for various reasons " including the technology
" is that an adolescent
center-of-the-universe fantasy has been
turned into a reality."
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- But Webcam proponents say their mode of self-exposure
is more about building online communities than tooting their own
horns.
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- "Friendships have gone south because of the project,"
Vidal said. "Me and the girl I was dating for a year broke up, not
because of Here and Now but it was the straw that broke the camel's back.
We'd hang out on camera, and I'd get e-mails from all these [people in
our chat room] saying, 'Look, dude, I know you really like this girl, but
she's treating you like s**t.' I thought, 'This is really something if
they can see it on their computers and I can't.'"
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- So why would you put your life
on display? For Vidal,
nephew of the author Gore Vidal, the answer is
simple: He can be the first
in a new wave of communication. With Web
sites like Here and Now, people
can actually take the first steps
towards living their lives online, he
said.
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- "It was the sort of
phenomena I assumed was going
to happen eventually. ... It was only
going to be a matter of time, and
I wanted to be the first to do
it," he said.
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- "I do have housemates that are very into playing
to the
camera," Vidal conceded. "On occasion, we treat the camera
like a person in the room. We talk to it and play with it. And mode number
two is when the camera's like the sullen guest in the corner we don't feel
like talking to it."
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- For every person who treads the line of exhibitionism
by providing unfettered access to their private life, there is also
somebody
watching, Butterworth noted.
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- "We've been feeding and
nurturing the voyeur in
the past 10 years, with all the tabloids and
everything. There wasn't much
left," he said. "We've
uncovered every little rock and cranny
of the famous. We all have an
obsession to peek. And I think when that's
combined to technology
that's available and cheap, we kind of take it to
this
extreme."
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- But for Voog, Webcams and the thousands of people who
tune in
are one of the best things that's ever happened, allowing her to
disseminate her art and writing to an eager and friendly audience.
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- "You're speaking
with people from different backgrounds
and different countries,"
she said. "I talk to them every day.
It's kind of like Cheers, a
little community where we all hang out."
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- "I never was nervous; I
like doing it. If anyone
was meant to do this, it was me," she
said. "I've found my niche,
my little medium of
communication."
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- "When people are watching me sleeping and stuff,
from all the nice e-mails I get, I feel that everyone's sort of an angel,
watching over me and protecting me."
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