On this episode of Spark: Online friendship, personal branding, and geoweb privacy.
The researchers expected the Facebook profiles to match an idealized version of the user’s personality. But to their surprise, the online Facebook profile matched the real-world personality test.
The evolution of the Internet has both mirrored and shaped the intense focus on self that is the hallmark of the post-boomer generation. Self-expression glides effortlessly into self-promotion as we shape our online selves--be it on a MySpace profile, LiveJournal blog or a YouTube video--to insure the greatest attention.
The researchers found significant correlations between the behavior of the volunteers in person and online. So a Facebook page really can say a lot about what a person is like in real life--up to a point.
Julia Allison can't act. She can't sing. She's not rich. But thanks to a genius for self-promotion, she's become an Internet celebrity.
At one time (and I’m old enough to remember this), it seemed as if everyone feared the Internet’s scope and potency. It held powerful secrets, from Social Security numbers to conspiracy theories. And it’s still a reckless place, largely governed by schadenfreude (TMZ) or voyeurism (Fmylife). Meanwhile, Facebook is a non-anonymous (hence tightly controlled) fantasy land. While the Internet unmasks,
Facebook can gloss over, trading honesty for fake intimacy -- exhibitionism flirting with normal social restraint.
What sets latter-day un- verbs apart from these historical examples is that the “reality rewind” is no longer a flight of counterfactual fancy: it’s built right into the interfaces that we use to make sense of our shared virtual worlds.
Journalist and campaigner Danny O'Brien thinks that the internet is eroding the sense of "private", leaving only the public and the secret.
Turkle talks about 2 jobs of adolescence - autonomy (defining boundaries of self) & intimacy - & how they are impacted by digital media. Always on connectivity makes autonomy difficult, & true intimacy may be undermined b/c teens use tech to avoid the risks involved in confronting others f2f. Turkle also notes that Erikson said teens need stillness for reflection in order to form their identities.
Does this technology, with its constant demands to collect (friends and status), and perform (by marketing ourselves), in some ways undermine our ability to attain what it promises—a surer sense of who we are and where we belong? The Delphic oracle’s guidance was know thyself. Today, in the world of online social networks, the oracle’s advice might be show thyself.
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On this episode of Spark: Online friendship, personal branding, and geoweb privacy.
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