If no one sees you online, do you really exist?

I work in Sociology and one of the foundational ideas in the discipline is that human beings are social creatures by nature and that our communities play an enormous role in forming our personal and relational identities. Even the most anti-social individual is connected to other people through kinship, work, ethnic, religious, or cultural ties. No one is an island, I don't care if you are a hermit living in a cave on a mountain cliff, the actions of other people can affect your life.

Since this assumption about human nature and society was drilled into me during graduate school, I was a little stunned thinking about this blog entry to realize I was going to be arguing against it and for the singular importance of the individual outside of their public relationships. We DO exist outside our relations to other people and their perception of us.

This dawned on me after reading another blog (whose name unfortunately escapes me now) in which the author discussed an exchange with a reader who lamented that since he didn't appear in any photos on the Flickr website that were taken of an event, it was like he wasn't even there, like he wasn't in attendance.

I'm living part-time in an online world where self-promotion is the norm and people are actively encouraged to develop their "personal brands" for career advancement. I am brand "Liz" and I write a blog about "X, Y, and Z" and if you hire me, you can "own" a piece of me by association. The argument for this point of view towards the self is that it gives ownership over ones identity and other people perception of ones identity back to the individual...you can shape the way people perceive you by highlighting those aspects of oneself one wishes to be known for (intelligence, resourcefulness, humor, trendsetting, productivity, ability to strategize, etc.). A person actively creates, cultivates, and promotes those aspects of oneself that you're trying to sell whether for business or personal reasons.

saysI have a lot of issues with treating oneself as a commodity which I might go into in another post. But I bring it up here because it seems like this is another manifestation of "what other people see is what is real". In the 1990s, concern about the confusion between public perception with reality was mainly aimed at violence and sex in movies and television and later, the whole concept of reality shows and people living out their lives on camera. I remember in Madonna's film Truth or Dare (1991), Warren Beatty says,

She [Madonna] doesn't want to live off-camera, much less talk. There's nothing to say off-camera. Why would you say something if it's off-camera? What point is there existing?

Now we see this online. The description of a person or event which is posted on the Internet--whether it is a blog entry, a video, a news story--is seen as authentic partially because of the speed in which the information or images can now be delivered. The person who first defines an individual or encounter, whatever link comes out highest in a Google Search, is seen as more authoritative than later analyses or commentaries with lower search engine results. Authors with lots of readers have greater influence and respect amongst members of their community and by journalists than lesser known authorities even when you read volumes of scathing comments on their blogs.

Any act or statement that can make a person more notable, leave a bigger impression, created greater fame means that this person's life and opinion is worth more....to a certain group of people in our society. It doesn't matter whether you're a famous tech blogger or William Hung, any kind of fame that distinguishes an individual from the "masses" is highly prized and sought after by many people. The kind of quiet, reflective presence, a person who creates or works out of inspiration or out of necessity in their little corner of the world...well, it is almost as if they don't exist an individual. If you Google someone's name and nothing appears, do they really exist?

Of course, this hunger for public recognition is not held by all or even the majority people in the U.S. Most people, surprise, surprise, are satisfied with their lives although they wish they had a little more free time for their family or friends, they wish they were a little thinner, and they wish they made a little more money. They don't need every significant moment in their lives recorded and posted online to know that it occurred. They can rely on their memories to remind themselves, albeit with colored lenses, what meaningful events happened in their lives. They don't mind keeping their personal and even professional lives private.

Now, I don't think one viewpoint is superior to another, they are just incompatible with each other and I think few people on either side of this divide appreciate the other side's
point of view. Part of this difference is generational and we are bound to see more online chronicling of people's lives as the U.S. population ages.

My parents don't understand why I have online friends, my older brother doesn't understand why I participate in online discussion groups and I don't understand why my younger friends post their personal photos online for public consumption. It is an escalating, growing level of public exposure of ones personal life and while I think this change is ultimately inevitable in America (although it won't happen overnight), I think that seeking online validations for ones existence, beliefs, presence gives too much weight to our visible, public image over our intrinsic sense of self-worth.

The bottom line or the big picture? There are BILLIONS of individuals living right now without an online presence, who would never show up in a Google search. They are real and I think it would behoove our future as a country not to forget that they exist in a number that far and away eclipses the number of people who blog or who have My Space or Facebook pages. They might ultimately enter the online world but we would be blind to forget that they are many, that they exist, and that they might compose a large influence in our country's and culture's future.

What would it even mean to live in a world with 6.68 billion personal brands?

When those we like=those we are like

I've been reading a lot of blogs over the past month, probably too many blogs. In my Twitter escapades, I've been a hungry learner, clicking on links and following leads, trying to learn as much as I can about social media. I didn't wade into the shallow end, I dove off the high dive.

In many ways, I felt like Alice in Wonderland...I recognized the characters but it was a weird, upside down, cyberworld that seemed nonsensical to me almost all of the time. And, foolishly perhaps, I openly displayed my slack-jawed incomprehension, hoping to be pitied, tutored, and finally embraced by this colorful, dynamic world of buzzing social extroverts. Much of the time, I was positively dizzy by the pace of it all, as I watched lives being lived rush past me. Some days, I found it almost intoxicating.

In hindsight, I can see I was following an old pattern...when I get bored with my life or my work becomes too difficult or too tedious, I immerse myself in something new and feel the zest and excitement that one feels as a beginning student or as a traveler setting off on the first leg of a journey into an unfamiliar part of the world.

But while I am in in this world, I clearly am not of it. I don't work in technology, PR, marketing, or finance, I'm not a consultant, venture capitalist, or social media "guru", and I've felt this tension of being the outsider for as long as I been playing in this Twitter/Facebook land. I'm a terrible actor and so I've tried to embrace my outsider stance even during times where I was cast as a minor league pariah.

I clumsily stepped on toes, I questioned common wisdom, I scoffed at those higher up on the food chain than I am, partly out of ignorance but also because my values seem to differ so much from my online peers. I expressed bewilderment and sarcasm when I encountered statements, thoughts or feelings that made me incredulous: "Who ARE you? How can you claim THAT?? Isn't it dehumanizing to think of people as 'personal brands'?"

By and large, I was simply ignored, as a small child would be who interrupted their parents' dinner party. A few people welcomed me, if only for the novelty value of having a new face at the table, while others actively exiled me from their online family of friends and sent me to another room. And that's okay because, after all, we are really all strangers to one another online. No one "owes" me their friendship, it has to be freely given and I am sorry if I ever personally offended anyone.

I have only good feelings towards those I've interacted with in these social communities except the few who were confrontational, racist, sexist, or boorish. I've normally been treated with patient kindness even when I clearly didn't know a lot about what I was talking about and for that I am grateful.

But I'm also glad that I might have asked some uncomfortable questions or disturbed the clubhouse atmosphere of these cliquish communities. The majority of folks I met online were white, college educated, decently paid, spoke English as a first language, and were between the ages of 22 and 40 and, I have to say, many displayed a distinctly superior attitude, almost one of entitlement. I ran into very little social critique of the inequities of American society and our culture of leisure and consumption is positively reveled in. Even in my days working in the music industry, I never heard of people participating in this many parties! Even those people with families seem to travel and party a lot more than my offline friends and colleagues.

Of course, I'm a participant in all this activity even if I'm outside the dominant Twitter demographic. I brought up Iraq once, the indecent price of conference registrations several times, occasionally criticizing industries that think everything of worth can be measured, quantified, and ranked. And these comments feel FLAT so I got the message and kept my conversation personal (cats, weather, work, sleep, travel, family, etc.) instead of political.

In the end, a community is what it is and it is hard if not impossible for one individual to change the tenor of the discussion especially someone who is admittedly of very little influence. And I don't think it is my place to try to change something that is clearly so massively popular. But I do think it is my place to reflect upon my experience and see what was positive and what is lacking.

So while I might have fondness for the individuals I've encountered and I am completely in awe of their enthusiastic, almost mission-like ambition in their professions, I am unimpressed with the social networks that have emerged in this Web 2.0 world, at least the ones I have seen. In these circles, connections with like minds are made but isn't the point of all of this interdependent, global connectivity to interact with those who are different from ourselves, those who have different views on what's important in life, those from who we can learn something besides how to advance our career?

Instead, social networks seem to create niches where people who seem to have the same political and cultural values hang out together and empathize with each other's ups and downs. They are support groups more than change groups. There is a place for these types of friendships in all of our lives, lives where we are tired and bruised much of the time. I don't want to minimize this at all.

But at this point, I think that the excitement around social networks and the belief that they actually can lead to changes in our society is completely inaccurate and doesn't reflect their segregated nature. Maybe some time, down the road this could occur but not today and not tomorrow. The rule of like attracting like still remains a guiding principle of human behavior.

P.S. After rereading this I thought I should add that I hope to continue to Twitter away and participate on Facebook although maybe not at the same high, intense level as in recent weeks. And, if it still needs to be said, this post is meant to be a critique of the limitations of social networks, not of the individuals who compose them.