"Marketing is about the Perception of Value." That's what a friend told me the other day when I mentioned a passion for a new found business opportunity. "You can throw anything up on a wall and make it stick for a while." True that it seems. While watching the Front line video "Growing Up Online," trying to find some synthesis between the opposing views of parents and children about their relationship with Social Media, I found myself jotting that statement in the margin of my notes. Playing with it, dividing it apart into it's components. Perhaps it is the ability to play around with perception itself and especially our own perceived value that is the real value in living the internet life.

Follow up:

I just got my own facebook, myspace and twitter accounts set up last week. I have to admit it's pretty cool. Suddenly people have began appearing out of the woodwork. People I know in real life who would not normally call me or give me the time of day are suddenly confirming me as their "friends." Suddenly I feel like I exist again and am part of a group. I think, "So this is where everybody has gone." I might as well have discovered the Secret Garden. I write mundane notes about my life, things I don't get an opportunity to tell others in real life, in a bold attempt to communicate the parts of my identity that I know most people don't have time to delve into inOfflineworld.

I first tried to set up a myspace account a month ago. I figured it was time to move on into the technological revolution with the rest of the world. For some probably technical and very impersonal reason I got an error message that said in some sort of jumbo mumbo that I did not meet the qualifications to be a Myspace member. I panicked. What do you mean, I don't qualify? I am human. I do too indeed belong! How dare it refuse me. On a scale of 1 to 10 my determination to begin social networking jumped from about a 2 to an 8. Clearly the ability to successfully hook in and be part of this virtual world can really mess with one's self esteem. It messes with our ability to perceive our own worth and "neededness". What if once I become a member, as I finally did last week, nobody wants to talk to me? What if nobody wants to be my friend? What if there is nobody who reads my profile and says.."Now there's somebody I want in my life."

I think one of the most difficult and essential skills to master on the path to adulthood is the ability to self-market, to spin ones uniqueness and incongruities in such a way that it grabs others, pulls them in instead of turns them off. Take Jessica, the aliased Autumn Edows, featured in the Frontline video, both girl misfit who turned her uniqueness into a possible future career as a model and photographer. She succeeded in doing what she could not do in school, and her parents responded by telling her that if a few didn't like it then she needed to be more careful. So they shut her down all together...What does that teach our kids...that others perceptions of them are more valuable to them than their own ability to manipulate those negative perceptions into positive results? Though that's what her parents wanted for her by challenging her activities. They thought she needed to learn this lesson, that others might think bad so she needed to watch what she put out there. Yet the were teaching this lesson to a girl who obviously already understood this reality and could have easily heeded their warning in real life and shut herself down (as did the boy in the video who committed suicide because of cyberbullying), yet chose to rise above the ridicule and develop her oddness into an artform. She was punished for having the very coping mechanisms that she needed to have in order to succeed. Thankfully her parents had a change of heart.

As a shy child, I wish the internet would have been available to me. I still struggle to overcome so many of my own weakness pointed out to me over and over in childhood, but perhaps with social media I could have practiced creative methods of self synthesis as many kids do now with all of the information they glean from the internet, taking from the here and there inside of me and remaking it into something beautiful and whole, something that sticks, permanently.