I have a few questions for the people who decided to submit supplemental videos to Tufts as part of their college applications:

First of all: How dare you.

Second of all: What?

Third: Do you honestly think you’ll come across well to a group of admissions officers and academics by showing a montage of pictures of—in the case of Hannah Briskin—your friends, family, Ellen Degeneres, Taylor Swift, candy, two dogs in sweaters, and other disjointed and nonsensical images?

Fourth: Are you or are you not aware—I’m guessing the latter—that it is really difficult to praise yourself and your extracurricular activities without sounding incredibly douchey? Maybe you aren’t especially capable of writing about yourself, either. Fine, I can accept that. But this new form of shameless self-promotion, designed to prove in under two minutes that you are worthy of admission to a university, does very little to show anything but insecurity and braggadocio, not necessarily academic or character-based value.

Fifth: Elenor Rosler, are you serious with that video of you riding your horse, claiming to be an athlete and broadcasting your equestrianism, all set to a very mismatched soundtrack of Creed’s “Higher”? Do you realize that someone is going to see this and then decide, based on you prancing around atop your prize pony, whether or not to let you into COLLEGE? No, but seriously. I want to know if you get it.

Sixth: You all need to cool it on the whole “I’m a really big nerd, but I love myself anyway!” trope. And while you’re at it, Amelia Downs, please stop doing your “Math Dances.” I get it, you like math and you like dancing, but I think you would be a lot better served, both in terms of college admissions and in life, had you just never done this.

While it is probably true that these kids saw this as an opportunity to distinguish themselves from their peers, and that they intended the video to be seen only by the admissions officers to whom they sent the link, the fact remains that they uploaded these videos to YouTube, the second-most visited site in the world. This, to me, seems to be a part of our generation’s increasing self-absorption and egotism, brought about in large part by the Internet and the inherent anonymity it provides.

Whether or not these Tuft applicants intended for the whole world to see their videos, they still provided the entire globe with access to them, essentially indicating to all of us that these videos, unbelievably inane for the most part (except for some of the stop-motion ones), are worthy of universal access—at least to everyone with a computer.

Even if we don’t put up admissions videos to YouTube, we’re all pretty guilty of this. I mean, my first word was “mine,” so while I may be railing against this cultural phenomenon, I don’t by any means consider myself to be above it. But neither are you.

Most of us have Facebook accounts, some people have YouTube accounts, blogs, Twitters, photo websites, and pretty much every other kind of social networking or personal website you could possibly imagine. Maybe we don’t approach it as a form of self-advertising, or we ignore the creepy idea that anyone in the world can look at what we’re doing, but implicit in all of this is that we are giving everyone access to all of our pictures, videos, jokes, and opinions. We share in complete defiance of every instinct towards personal preservation and privacy that we might have, or with which we were raised: Don’t talk to strangers, but maybe it’s okay to talk to them (and look at them face-to-face) in a chat room?

Twitter is one website that both indulges and capitalizes upon these tendencies towards self-reference and self-obsession. Though many of us initially regarded Twitter as a service that only old people wanted or thought was cool, and one that certainly wouldn’t last, there is a growing contingent of young Twitter users, and a fair number at Yale as well. While Twitter is kind of funny, and fairly difficult to take seriously, there is something so creepily self-indulgent about it. Why do we think that our friends need or want to be updated about what we’re doing or thinking, or thinking about doing, or buying ,or thinking about buying, or eating, or thinking about eating at any given moment, in 140 characters or fewer? Are our individual actions so compelling as to necessitate a server to contain and communicate them to a universal audience?

Another uncomfortable fact of the modern age is the Internet’s—and specifically YouTube’s—ability to transform real-world nobodies into virtual celebrities. Take Justin Bieber, on a seriously macro scale; Yale’s own Sam Tsui, DC ’11; Tavi Gevinson (via blog), the 13-year-old tastemaker. Sure, these people are remarkable—talented singers or precociously fashionable—but why do they deserve our attention? Can our culture support a proliferation of homemade celebrities? At some point, will it lead to a watering-down of culture just because fame and recognition is that much more attainable?

In some ways, it’s easier to assert yourself in the abyss of the Internet, where you don’t know who’s reading or watching or looking at what you’ve done, what they really think about it (unless they write comments), and where rejection is completely impersonal. You can be bold in gesture without being confident in practice.But the Internet also has the capacity to create distance between people: The more time we waste looking at other people’s pictures instead of actually hanging out with them, and interacting through message than speaking, the more we become engaged in our own Internet-based world we have created on our personal computers. While the Internet may make communication easier, it also reduces the need for action and activity between people.

Forgive my musings: This is just something that totally freaks me out. All I can say is, for the sake of Tufts and all other universities thinking of following suit, for the sake of our individual self-awareness, I hope that everyone thinks twice before uploading a video to YouTube of a montage of their shoes and what they’ve done in them. Seriously.