It was originally Descartes who said ‘Cogito ergo sum‘ – I think therefore I am – a catchy little statement that supposedly defined existence. This was later revised in the 20th century by philosopher A J Ayer who thoughtfully suggested ‘I do and I have, therefore I am.’

But it didn’t stop there, as next up was the Post Modernist irony of conceptual artist Barbara Kruger, who announced: ‘I Shop Therefore I Am’. Which is not a million miles from O.T.T.‘s ‘I’m pink therefore I’m Spam.’

Well, maybe Kruger was right, as the latest trend for Girls of the YouTube Generation is to display their Shop Art, the ‘haul’ of clothes they have bought, and describe them in intimate detail.

Take a look at small town America, where 16-year-old Blair sits inher pink-walled bedroom, revealing her stash of goodies from a day’s shop out at Forever 21. Blair shows the anonymous viewer her new black blouse, her new cardigan, and the bargain-to-die-for, her $6.99 jeans, whilst giving a running commentary on each.

“OK, so normally it would bother me if my jeans didn’t have any detail on the rear end,” Blair says. “But I was actually reading and they say that if there is not any design on the back pocket on your jeans … somehow it makes your butt look smaller. So way to go for these jeans!”

Other YT Girls, like SoCal Ashley just go for fashion, music & make-up, while Beauty Cakez puts out her own Beauty Showfrom her aquamarine Hello Kitty bedroom.

Yet, it is not just YT Girls who like show and tell.

The YouTube Boys prefer to take apart and fix their latest gadgets, while feverishly telling you what they’re doing. It’s almost like a Deconstructivist techno-porn.

For the YouTube Generation it’s ‘I show and I share, therefore I am”

(via)

I always had my YingYang with some Girls who do Make-up/Clothes/Styling videos. On the on side it bothers me to seeing them always in the top50 of daily videos. On the other side I am wondering (and fascinated) whether or not they are making a living with that (top 10). 
FCC should write them that they actually have to disclose when they got unsolicited stuff in their PO box. They do blog/review that stuff. And its quiet often not clear if they bought it or if they got a rebate or they got a review sample.

Consider what happened in September [09], when the insurance industry released a study purporting to show that reform would cause insurance premiums to skyrocket. The Senate Finance Committee—the logjam in the legislative process—was set to vote on its bill in less than 48 hours. The study, commissioned by the insurance lobby and conducted by a private accounting firm, represented a clear effort to undermine support. It was the kind of move that lobbying groups make all the time—and, in the old days, it might have worked, since nobody would have seen through the study’s tilted assumptions until, as with McCaughey’s old article, the damage had been done. But within hours of its publication, several blogs, including this one, had published critiques showing just how flawed the study was. The critiques circulated in Washington and provoked a backlash against the insurers. Wavering Democrats said they were offended by the effort at political sabotage; the Finance Committee went on to pass the bill, as it had originally planned.

Not that fact-checking was the media’s sole job over the last year. Speaking for myself, I certainly spent far more time on the more mundane task of explanation—whether it was describing how a particular policy proposal might work or laying out the political dynamics of a particular moment. Occasionally this writing got a lot of attention, because it included a reporting tidbit that qualified as a scoop. More often, it didn’t. But over time I came to realize that the mere sharing of information has enormous value—even to people in Washington who, you might suppose, already know what they need to know.

Indeed, one of the many lessons I learned over the last year is that, even at the very highest levels of power, people frequently operate with limited knowledge and perspective. That’s true of how they think about policy and that’s true of how they think about politics. As one high-ranking official memorably told me in February, while everybody was scrambling to salvage reform after the Massachusetts Senate race, nobody really sees the whole playing field.

[via The New Republic - Finishing ‘The Treatment’]