It could have been a great column.
For almost three years now I've kept a bookmark for an article from Salon.com
in a "future columns" folder, expecting that one day it would become
the centerpiece of what to my mind promised to be a fascinating column. That
article dealt with teens who expose various parts of themselves via web cameras
on their web sites, and in return receive presents via the wish lists that they
post on amazon.com or similar sites.
It was a captivating issue, and held the promise of one that could be examined
from numerous angles. Even though I lost my original bookmark of the article in
a crash of long ago I was able to locate it again, at least once. It didn't bother
me that a possible column on this phenomenon was drifting farther and farther
away, becoming less and less timely. I have, after all, already admitted that
immediacy isn't among the qualities I value in these columns. I did, however,
find it rather strange that I never seemed to come across additional articles
that related to the same phenomenon. What's more, I wasn't overly enthusiastic
about seeking out more examples. Sites of teenyboppers showing skin isn't really
what I'm into, and even though many of the sites I clicked to were actually quite
tame and even modest (although some of them seemed to have been taken over by
bona-fide porn sites by the time I got around to viewing them), I always felt
more than just a bit uncomfortable browsing these sites to gather information
from them.
But what turned out to be most problematic was that as I browsed these sites I
could only find very limited examples of those wish lists. Here I was trying to
examine a truly captivating topic, but almost all I had to go on was one article.
I did find one
additional article that reviewed teen webcams and, within that context, reported
on those wish lists, but that was about the extent of what I was able to find.
That certainly wasn't enough for a column.
I'd wanted to describe, and reflect upon, what seemed to be a fascinating phenomenon, but it seems that I missed the boat. By the time I got around to working up what I had into a column I discovered that, from the evidence I was able to collect, it had become a non-issue ... if it had ever been an issue to begin with.
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