[From OM]
Consider a common housing-wanted ad on Craigslist:
I’m a mature woman who just moved to San Francisco. I’m friendly, considerate and pretty clean. I’m fairly quiet and am responsible about paying bills on time. I love arts and crafts, cooking and traveling.
In searching for housing or looking for a date, people often describe themselves in order to find others like them for a comfortable housing situation. People use the context of their search to help direct what aspects of themselves they share. When looking for housing, people are trying to be honest, direct and descriptive because the genuinely want to find a compatible roommate.
Yet, what does it mean to describe oneself as “neat”? What is the context in which this trait is being ascribed? It is very dependent on one’s experiences with other roommates. Compared to the roommates i’ve had in the past, perhaps i can describe myself as neat, but is that truly meaningful for future roommates? Traits like mature, neat, friendly, considerate, clean, etc. are only meaningful in context.
People seeking people online often express frustration over the self-depictions, irritated by what they perceive as deception. I would argue that most perceived deceptions are not lies, but moments where the presenter is trying to describe themselves as either 1) how they see themselves; 2) who they are working to be. I can describe myself as neat and you might see this as deceptive, but i see this as truth compared to my own experiences. I might describe myself as neat because i’m really trying to be neat and thus, i don’t see it as a lie so much as an attribute that i’ve not fully possessed. Of course, neither of these are particularly helpful to you who is looking for someone neat based on your calculation of what that term means. And thus, you see deception.
Trying to construct a portrait of myself requires a level of self-reflection that is not something that most people are comfortable or capable of doing. I must also assess the readers’ assumptions of ‘norm’ in order to build this depiction, yet how can i assess the norms of an unknown audience? I can’t. As such, i must first make a guess about these norms by constructing what i believe to be universals – universal conceptions of ‘clean.’ But who am i to construct a universal measurement of cleanliness with limited experience? And why should i expect you to have the same mental model?
Reading a profile of someone requires the reader to not read on their terms, but on the terms of the presenter. What is the presenter trying to say about themselves? What context are they in when describing themselves? How can you determine their sense of norms? Of course, this is not something that one can simply do by staring at a profile.
Most social tools center on profiles and while we’re becoming accustomed to reading and constructing these profiles, observing and developing productions of identity in mediated contexts is not a naturalized activity. So long as we’re building tools that rely on this, we must consider the complications that are being introduced by profiles instead of bodies.
What’s interesting to me, however, is that the social software tools I used most often–Flickr, del.icio.us, iTunes music sharing–don’t rely at all on profiles. Instead, I’m getting to know other users based on their content and contributions. I decided to add Flickr contacts now based on the photos they’ve posted, and/or the comments they’ve made on my site–which is the same way blogs work for me. I’m encouraged by the way these tools that work based on observed rather than described personas are picking up steam in the marketplace.
um. what definition of “neat” are you using? 🙂
i totally agree with liz. content and behavior over articulation! in my experience, most ppl have grossly distorted ideas of their presentation of self. like, seriously. let evidence speak for itself.
I agree that context is important and that content and usage (including Austinian speech acts) provides a (spun) version of it. I recall a friend condo-hunting this spring in East Bay within a specific price range. She became very adept at decipering the “code” of verbal & visual housespeak. More content usually gave more “data” to decipher meanings. What’s interesting to me is how users have to learn the code in each context.
I found this post interesting. I often describe myself to people who don’t know me as the person who I am trying to be.