The camera lens hurriedly twitches, her presence is instantly registered. She is Serena van der Woodsen, emerging at Grand Central, Gossip Girl, Season One, Episode One. She is Kelly Conlon, traveling with her daughter’s Girl Scouts field trip last December, ejected by security from Madison Square Garden after facial recognition technology immediately identified her as an attorney working with a firm suing MSG Entertainment.
Gone, like T9 texting, is the once exciting novelty of being important, popular, scandalous enough to have your every move captured, diffused, neutralized. The new iteration of Gossip Girl was deemed deletable this year yet was determinedly doomed from the start—its creators failed to consider there are no more thrills behind watching the watched, there is no XOXO that comes after the grainy face staring back above the self-checkout kiosk.
