Comments on: impression management: blogs as terrible representations

By: Structure+Strangeness

Structure+Strangeness — Mon, 25 Jul 2005 22:46:29 +0000

Reality as just another kind of media

danah boyd has an excellent observation piece on her blog apophenia in which she discusses the problems with connecting together physical and digital persona for the same person. From the entry: … Given Aronsons’ work (in brief, first impressions mat…

By: ShannaLee

ShannaLee — Tue, 24 May 2005 13:18:32 +0000

Reading this has made me smile inside and out! I just wrote something about this very topic on my blog – although not nearly as eloquently. It’s been coming up for me over and over this past month. I wonder if the universe is trying to tell me something… Hmmm time for some introspective analysis.

By: meta

meta — Sun, 22 May 2005 00:06:51 +0000

Well, I had seen your blog before I met you, and thinking back, I was not surprised by your pink hair, but I was a little surprised that you hugged me goodbye.

I think this blog accurately conveys parts of you that can be conveyed verbally — the intellectual sharpness and the questioning and the introspection. But it doesn’t really get across that your speech is peppered with non-verbal sound effects, and you’re cuddly and so is your cat. Knowing you f2f, the blog persona fits quite naturally with the rest of you. Not knowing you f2f, you can only guess what the “rest of you” is.

hmm. and now I miss you guys and wish I were back in SF. Which I will be in about a week. I’ll try to catch you before you leave for my motherland.

By: tony

tony — Tue, 17 May 2005 02:03:00 +0000

well, it reminds me of those stories about prison pen pals…

By: Bill Moseley

Bill Moseley — Mon, 16 May 2005 22:20:47 +0000

This is a very interesting phenomenon. Pepperdine University’s Online MA in Eduactional Technology has long had the motto that students in the program need to “be real before being virtual”, and structures the program so that students have a week-long, face to face experience at the beginning of the program. The effect of this is that when students return home to commence with the year-long program, they can put a voice/face/personal experience with the online personality with whom they are trying to build a community of learning. Contrast this with an online program where people don’t have that physical resource, and you have a very interesting picture of what “being real” adds to an online relationship.

By: barb dybwad

barb dybwad — Mon, 16 May 2005 18:39:16 +0000

Maybe there’s something to be said about blogspace being less conducive to the kind of immediate interaction you can get f2f. And that maybe the rapid back and forth that happens in person just can’t be substituted. But it’s still very difficult to get to “know” someone in one sitting, and true intimacy still develops over time — with many pictures of self exchanged between the parties in various mediums, which somehow creates a sense of “knowing” that is larger than the sum of those individual interactions. Why does it have to be a value judgment of which medium is “more difficult,” or which allows a better “picture” of self? They’re all imperfect, and the mental models we make will always be incomplete. There are misunderstandings in all interactions — though maybe there is a case that in blog world it’s sometimes harder to ask for clarification and get a satisfying response. So then, maybe it’s the level of interaction that’s key (in whatever medium), with more interaction = higher probability of realistically knowing.

Then again, I think about some of the authors I’ve read and dearly loved over the course of my life, many of whom are long dead and whom I will never meet — yet I feel that somehow I have known something essential about their souls and that that knowledge has been real and powerful enough to carry me through dark times when I’ve felt alone, just knowing they existed. Is that a kind of knowing someone? If I had met them in person, would they have shattered all of those thoughts and presented a picture that was very different? Quite possibly. But then — is the experience I had of “knowing” them, and the effect it had on my life, any less real?

And then, there are those people we meet once and instantly grok, and others we see every day and never really get, and a corresponding parallel effect in blogworld. So it can’t be about the medium alone… it has to be some special alchemy that turns strangers into friends, and no matter what mediates that process, we can always learn to be more open to the transformation, and more forgiving of the misunderstandings en route.

This question reminds me of this thread, which I was just tripping on the other night. How funny.

By: This is going to be BIG.

This is going to be BIG. — Mon, 16 May 2005 10:31:36 +0000

apophenia: impression management: blogs as terrible representations

Link: apophenia: impression management: blogs as terrible representations.