A Reflection on e-Self
Homo Likeomicus
Having spent so much time in the internet in the past two years, and now working for a company in which business depends on how people uses it brings to me so many mixed feelings and concerns. Yet the biggest ones are still the same: how honestly we manage our online web presence? And, secondly, How much in need of external re-assurance and instant gratification are we actually in the need of?
It seems to me that all opinion, personal concept, activity, and thought, is under the mercy of people’s approval. We take so many pictures of our food, party time, travel, life events, but we sort of put make up in them in reality before posting them. We hide content that can hurt us and just share what people will praise us for. What about those reputation related “issues” (e.g. an undesired pregnancy)? I have seen so many cases in real life in which a fact is hidden from the internet until it is possible to show as something worth of envy or to be proud of, and then, it is even shown like it was a expected event. Or congratulating a person who is not even on Facebook for a birthday when you can simply do it in real life, I hope is not to get “likes”.
I remember when the internet used to be a place to escape (more or less) from reality, and now the world wide web brings all our issues from real life to itself. Now, is very common to have contacts and public interaction with people from our professional lives too. We are bound to our own public relations and cannot freely state our opinions under the risk of being fired, tangled in a controversy, or simply judged. Managing a facebook account, and overall a personal web presence, is a full time job. Want to feel 100% free? do not open a Facebook account.
It is moment to reduce and re-classify my facebook friends list. Never forget that human-relations economics are brutally applied online.
I want to respond to a very nice, thoughtful post by blinkforward.
One of the most important questions I think that he asked was this: how we can honestly manage our online presence and why do we hide aspects of our life that might hurt us while waiting for something that we can put forth what we will receive praise for.
I would respond by saying that this is only a natural response to the inherent social character of the internet. I don't believe the internet, as a technological organism, will ever take us (as biological organisms) seriously. The processing power of the world wide web is quickly advancing and, as a collective whole, possesses more intelligence than any single human being. (I say intelligence here in an ironic sense and what I really mean is immediately retrievable data storage.)
I don't think the internet has the character that truly embraces each human being as a sacred being; rather, I believe it processes us in sort of whimsical fashion. I think this is something of the character of those who have created the internet: us.
The main characteristic of the internet is play, with identity and gender and sexuality and motives and expression. Everything is play, is an endless sign with a hall-of-mirrors referent.
Honestly portraying oneself on the internet is not wise (as the internet, I believe, has the capacity to mock our true selves, if not in content than in the forms of expressions provided).
I also feel honestly portraying oneself on the internet is not possible unless the self is a two-dimensional sound-byteable being. Which it is not. Although the internet does provide interesting in-roads for business, corporations, advertising campaigns to simplify the human being.
If that's accomplished, then maybe the internet could honestly portray a human being; but not a human being as we understand ourselves and not honesty as we understand it or attempt to use it.
Blinkforward's website, by the way, is the following: http://danilosierra.com/ Follow him.