For a culture in which 70% of men aged 17-34 admit to viewing pornographic websites monthly and in which “sexting over forty” is an increasingly common feature of romantic relationships, are Anthony Weiner and his cyber-escapades inevitable?
Tom Hoopes seems to think so. Writing for National Review Online, he sees Weiner’s behavior as symptomatic of a society that places a high premium on fleeting amusement while utilizing technologies that foster a wider and wider disconnect between our “real” selves and our “digital” identities:
He is a product of the age of the digitized body. Marketing yourself isn’t just for celebrities anymore. Now, we all market ourselves, choosing just the right Facebook profile picture and photo albums to tell the story we want to about our lives. We start to divorce our “self” from our actual body. This phenomenon reaches its extremes in avatars and sexting: The digital me becomes the exciting me.
Thus we are create a society where a member of Congress is able to carry on inappropriate relationships with half a dozen women he has never met and send his body’s constituent parts to the four corners of the nation from the privacy of his TV room.
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