Right, I’m writing this in confessional tone because I know you all did it when you got hold of some sort of web-cam and I count on you to come forward with similar confessions… Not because I want to attract you’re-such-a-looser type of comments, which I am also aware will inevitably happen. But hell, I’m brave enough, I will suffer for the social truth.

Or perhaps for an excuse to publish some more photos of myself.

I already published at least 3 of the photos I made with photobooth on flickr. Photobooth, dear reader, is an application, which arrives with all sorts of Mac computers that have build in photo/video cameras. Hell, I even recorded a post with it for my tumblr blog. And if you think that is as low as it gets you’re in for a surprise. I shall knock from underneath.

There’s 30 photos of me saved in the photobooth album. I had this computer (i.e. this camera) for just about a month. That gives an average of a photo a day. A day! Not to mention all the ones I deleted because I didn’t like the way I looked on them… 30 photos and what for? So that I have a wide range of to serve as all sorts of avatars, farcebook profile pictures, tumblr posts with captions that attempt to excuse such blatant self-indulgence.

Back in the day we didn’t want our real names on anything that was published online. Not even in e-mail ‘from’ field in some cases. I’d have few friends who sent their electronic correspondence in the name of the likes of Jane Austin. These days it’s not only that our name is a brand that connects all aspects of our scattered selves from facebook profile to youtube videos. We geo-tag. We publish our longitude and latitude - in real time. Any geeky hit man could have a very easy job these days. Birth dates, mobile numbers, photos of family and friends, enough data for Interpol to reduce their workforce by one third.

It’s not necessarily vanity. Like i said it’s branding. But at the core of things, we want to be recognizable. This is why we are all mad for customizing things. So that they are ours, or more to the point - us. Anonymity is no longer the attraction (not that it is possible either). It’s being able to be somebody that counts. Which is what facebook understands. So does Jaiku - you can pull updates of all (or almost all) your content in to your profile.

So here, I’m out of the closet as a quiet self-admirer. Your turn.

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