The taming of shaming
Wednesday, June 20, 2007

So I went along to Chinwag's Dark Side of Social Media on Tuesday, which turned out to be rather thought provoking.

I spoke briefly about my digital experiences. I first started being "public" online when I was 14. We'd consider it an "impressionable age" these days, I suppose, but at that time (the year 2000!) there wasn't a terrible amount of prior art for being young and mouthy online. GeoCities was, I suppose, the nearest thing to having a horribly pimped MySpace, and very few people I knew personally were using Friendster, the standard social network of its day.

So, I set up a blog, because that was really all there was to do. And the most interesting bloggers at that time used their real names, so I thought this was the thing to do too. That's what I did - and what I've done ever since.

(Up until recently, I was a Community Dude for an online game, which meant establishing a close relationship with the player community. A handful of Facebook friend requests later, a sizable number of them know the street I live on, my phone number, and more besides. I only mention it as an illustration of how lax my online privacy is, and also how the corporate transparency I tried to encourage as part of my job ended up influencing the degree of my personal visibility.)

I espouse the view that maintaining an integrated online identity keeps you honest. I like the idea of developing a 'reputation' online, and part of that is acting responsibly and politely. I might have an opinion on something, and there's a risk that other people will disagree and hold it against me, now or, as is increasingly possible, later. I owe it to myself, then, to express these opinions with a modicum of thought and decency. That's a good thing all round - a kind of digital citizenship.

I suppose this is partly a worldview thing - the counterargument from others would be that they're uncomfortable saying anything and associating it with their central identity, or at least they'd prefer not to. I entirely understand that, but I think it's a vaguely unhealthy viewpoint, a bit like 'not going to parties because people might find you annoying.' As I strive to become more active online, I do occasionally come up against these little mental barriers where I feel less-than-entirely comfortable with doing something under a "Guy Parsons brand." But George Foreman sells this lean mean grilling machine, right, and he says: "I'm so proud of it, I put my name on it!" You can switch the cause and effect, though - if you put your name on it, you can learn to be proud of it, or at least take ownership of it.

Luke Weaver later came back to a similar point (although I missed the comment he was responding to!) and saying that maybe, if technology does mean we sacrifice privacy, we might become more compassionate as a result. As our ability to hide the truth wanes, perhaps our ability to handle the truth - our truth, and the truth of others - increases.

One of the interesting facets of digital identity, and particularly social networking, is the element of passive performance. I think most people would be vaguely terrified of standing up in front of a crowd of 100-odd people - even people they already knew - and saying anything, but online that's exactly what you can do.

Labels: chinwag, facebook, identity, privacy, social media, social networks, socnets

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Cut it out
Tuesday, June 05, 2007

One of the interesting things about social networking is how it makes the invisible visible - and from a user perspective, how it makes the natural deliberate.

I find people leaving groups and deleting interests poetic, where poetic is of course a euphemism for depressing.

The in-joke that's stopped being funny. The favourite song that cloys and irritates. To look at a list of what you thought mattered - getting more people from your halls to join a group than all the people from the other halls, to identify as "kinda geeky but kinda rand0m too", to ironically worship your Biomathematics lecturer - and to find these things no longer resonate, but jar.

Online, things don't fade. They're deleted, pruned, scoured, until we're left with no trace that anything of import happened here.

The tracking and deliberatization of these behaviours might be unnatural, but not necessarily bad. Take biofeedback:

Biofeedback is involves measuring a subject's bodily processes such as blood pressure, heart rate, skin temperature, galvanic skin response (sweating), and muscle tension and conveying such information to him or her in real-time - ny providing access to physiological information about which the user is generally unaware, biofeedback allows users to gain control over physical processes previously considered automatic.

Labels: memory, socnets

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