we called it the hitchhiker talk once
- and often I moaned – oh I would just love
to meet a single one who was not being about
to build a beautiful house for his mother …

it might seem easier – with apparent no control
- to boast a bit instead of staying real even if it
might urge to explain naturally lacking perfection

also the desire to protect a leftover of privacy
when exposing on public profiles, will cast its part
for deciding conveniently and starting a second life.

likely I’m not even exactly the good guy, yet
smart enough to know how difficult it could be
to keep track of all the uhm reality-smoothings …

Wrote about this a bit re: the new media conference coming up this weekend. http://www.shapingyouth.org/blog/?p=255

Are you speaking in N.Y.? If not, you SHOULD be. Your eloquence, logic, data, and POV is necessary!

“Anonymous” appears to have stood the social network concept on its head by creating a community in which it is an explicit norm not to know who anybody is.

A typical expression of the anonymous ideal is the following:

*****************************************
Anonymous is legion.
Anonymous does not forgive.
And most of all, Anonymous does not f**king forget.
Ever.
United As One. Divided By Zero.
*************************************************

The Internet is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we *can* imagine.

Good night, and good luck.

-Steve

Sorry for the rambling. The “name as brand” piece, though, it interesting to examine. Especially in an increasingly corporate culture.

(1) Lying is a pervasive part of life, and has been for a long time. I suppose there are cultures which socialize approval or disapproval of various kinds of lies in various contexts, but I suggest that this only skews the content of a practice which remains universally pervasive in any case.

The social scientists in the audience will perhaps be familiar with the concept of “pluralistic ignorance” which was taught in the sixties when I took my own soc classes. This is the idea of a community in which virtually everybody violates the officially held community norms, but almost everybody thinks they are the only one who does. Or, in other words, everybody’s lying.

I think the discovery of pervasive dishonesty is particularly shocking to academics, because the academic community places a high official value on the norm of truthfulness, and tends to attract a constituency who are down with that. Plus, some unknown but surely significant portion of the academic community have some degree of Asperger’s Syndrome, the so-called “nerd disease”, one of whose symptoms is compulsive honesty. (I should point out, from my own experience that being compulsively honest doesn’t mean you can’t or don’t lie. To the contrary, if you can convince yourself that it is justified or permissible, you are usally much more effective as a liar than is the habitually dishonest person. Having a great love and respect for the truth gives you a head start in being able to effectively counterfeit it.)

(2) Lying online has its own particular set of traditions and motivations. Let’s start out with the SF novel Ender’s Game, which is reputed to have had a strong impact on bright and alienated kids of the generation contemporary with it’s publication. One of the subplots concerns how Ender’s brother and sister, Peter and Valentine WIggins use the constructed online identities of Demosthenes and Locke who essentially take over the reins of power in their society through a carefully constructed public online political dialogue. Obviously, they don’t reveal their true status as young kids. (Well, peter does, when he surfaces to run as Hegemon, but by that time he is older.)

And then there is the Internet guru whose name I forget who coined the saying “on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog”. This was exemplary of a viewpoint which suggested and perhaps even advocated that one’s identity in the virtual world of online need not be closely related to one’s “real” identity, if that concept even had meaning.

(3) From personal experience I can say what it feels like “from the inside” to create fake profiles, chat and email as the assumed identity, etc. Of course, as an older adult, this may not map precisely to what a teen might experience doing these things.

First, there is simply the throwaway login to the site that demands your data in return for the free goodie of the moment. That’s where I just put down Charles U. Farley at 123 Main Street, email nobody@nowhere.com. I don’t even really think of this as lying, since I don’t expect any humwn processes the info. This is just hacking an automated system.

Then there’s the “fun” profiles. These are exercises in fiction. It’s enjoyable to create fictitious identies, to pretend to be somebody you’re not, to see what it feels like to interact as that assumed person. This is akin both to creating a character in a role-playing game, and also has elements of how one constructs a character in a novel, or “becomes” a character as a dramatic actor. It’s intended as harmless fun, but it can have a dark side. I have been disturbed when I found that me troubled female anarchist teen character on yahoo began to attract responses from (presumed) real people who were wanting to bond with her. These kind of activities can raise energies that the user may not be able to fully control.

Then, and this isn’t one I have done, is the “tribute” profile. This is put up in the name of some publiv respected (or historical) figure, and maintained in the first person via that person’s writings or speeches. The Stephen Hawking myspace profile is a good example. And then there are the paradoy profiles, constructed for public figures you don’t like. See the massive number of Rupert Murdoch myspace profiles, for example.

And then, there are the anonymous profiles. These are just for the purpose of interacting without having to become known as your true identity. These may be “tweaked” as to age, gender, location, etc. to fit in with the milieu of the particular forum but the motivation is more simple concealment than fiction. This is more in the spirit of what Peter and Valentine did.

Well, those are my thoughts of the moment. Hope they are useful.

-Steve

Everything you wrote makes sense, and you obviously have the data to back it up. I suppose it’s just wishful thinking on my part, then.

Like the managerial mentality, the traffic engineer is another perception which is built into modern society, and affects the way we attempt to socialise in all kinds of spaces.