We, the tech-savvy at risk youth, hold these truths to be mostly self-evident…
1. We have entire conversations with extensions of ourselves.
2. When we get a text, it feels like we’re getting a hug.
3. We trick ourselves into thinking that selfies are photographic evidence of our attractiveness.
4. We know our 14 year old girlfriend in Second Life could also be a 45 year old truck driver from Dakota named Doug.
5. We know we should stop bad behavior, but instead we only copy and paste it into livestreams or complain about it in the virtual public sphere.
6. We have a secret language that older people can’t understand, instead of laughing out loud, we just say lol.
7. We embrace the fact that parts of our private lives are shared in public.
8. 80% of our phone’s pictures are of food, but we try to resist the temptation of uploading them to Facebook because everyone already thinks we’re nuts.
9. We allow our smartphones to make going to the bathroom a social activity.
10. We feel deeply hurt when we get no likes or the wrong person pokes us.
11. We believe in no real difference between our online identity (virtual identity) and offline identity (real identity).
We, therefore, the Representatives of the Kitten ppl firmly believe in the reality of the virtual and in the human motivation behind it.
