This past weekend, ‘Saturday Night Live,’ hosted by Daniel Radcliffe, aired a mock talk-show skit titled ‘You Can Do Anything!’

The hosts, photo blogger Christina Nickels, portrayed by Vanessa Bayer, and an independent filmmaker, Roger Knight, portrayed by Bill Hader, interviewed three untalented, inexperienced and, ultimately, delusional characters meant to symbolize our generation’s extreme self-confidence.

‘The only show that celebrates the incredibly high self-esteem of the YouTube generation,’ Bayer’s character said. Followed by Hader’s character stating, ‘Because now, thanks to technology and everyone being huge pussies about everything, it doesn’t matter if you don’t have skills or training or years of experience, you can do it!’

And according to Obama: Yes, we can.

But the skit left out some important factors in our inflated self-esteem. The freedom to create a YouTube account where we can share meaningless videos — and remix them to a dubstep song if we find them funny — isn’t the only thing convincing us all that we’re the next big thing.

First off, for every YouTube sensation, there are at least three dozen (that we’ll hear of) equally talented users who will follow up with their own unique spoof. ‘Sh*t Girls Say’ was hilarious. Then came ‘Sh*t Girls Say to Gay Guys,’ ‘Sh*t Guys Don’t Say,’ ‘Sh*t White Girls Say to Black Girls’ (a personal favorite), ‘Sh*t Straight Girls Say to Lesbians’ and so on. With more than 6 billion people in the world, the combinations are endless. ‘Sh*t Suburban Moms Say’ kind of killed it, but still — she gets an A for effort. She tried.

It’s reassuring to know that we don’t need to come up with an original idea. We just need to wait long enough for someone else to come up with one, and then follow his or her lead.

If you’re clever enough to think of a unique hashtag to supplement your YouTube video, let the trending begin. Some might argue that the hashtag must come before the YouTube video. #dontcare.

There’s a true art form in being able to sum up an entire situation with a few simple words that exclude the space bar and are preceded by four, fun diagonally crisscrossed lines. Where would our country — or for that matter, our world — be if we had never realized that we could state an opinion, concern or statement and follow it up with a ‘#firstworldproblems!’ or ‘#thatswhathesaid’ and the now classic ‘#winning.’ It really is the simple things in life that matter most.

If you’re clever enough to come up with a unique Twitter account, then you can just kiss your dull, humdrum life goodbye, superstar.

Perhaps the most crucial factor in nurturing our exaggerated egos is in the detailed technique of editing social media default photographs. With endless websites, cellphone applications and Apple programs we can crop, highlight, retouch, enhance and darken. We can adjust contrast, brightness, hue, saturation, and we apply sepia, black and white, boost, antique, cross-process and so much more. Never again does anyone need to know what we actually look like.

If the Internet ever permanently replaces glossy prints, we can take comfort in the fact that the glowing versions of ourselves will be immortalized in cyberspace forever. Our children, our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren will be sure to always remember us as the most photogenic generation.

Because in the end, it is all about us. Mediocrity, shame, inadequacy? Not in this generation. We can do anything — and we’re certainly not afraid to admit that we can’t.

Lauren Tousignant is a senior communications and rhetorical studies and writing major. Her column appears weekly. She can be reached at letousig@syr.edu.  

Published on January 24, 2012 at 12:00 pm